Some accusations arrive as a package. A friend of mine, the one this series calls the Harbinger, handed me three at once. According to him I am anti-Christian, pro-communist and an Islamist. He did not offer it as an insult. He offered it as a diagnosis, and he hinted that the three were stages on a road, a trajectory that ends where the Democrats are headed in the midterms.

I have been called worse by better. But this one deserves a full answer because it is a clean specimen of a bad argument, and bad arguments are the subject of this series.

What follows is the case I would make to him, laid out as a dialogue. The Harbinger’s charges appear in summary. The Heretic’s answers appear in full.

You are anti-Christian. Everybody can see it. You pick at the Bible, you mock prophecy, you attack believers and you side with people who want God out of public life.

Calling someone anti-Christian takes one second. Proving it takes evidence, context and standards. One is a weapon. The other is work.

So let me do the work you skipped. Here is what I have actually written. I have argued that failed prophecy is a matter of record and not a matter of taste. I have argued that when a friend says the Bible forbids something, he should show me the verse and not wave toward a feeling. I have argued that every religion belongs in its own lane and out of the machinery of government.

Read that list again and find the sentence that attacks Christians. You will not find one. Each position is aimed at a claim I think is wrong. Not one is aimed at the people who hold it.

I can say the Bible contains no explicit commandment on abortion and also say Christian culture built much of what is worth keeping in this country. I have written both. A man who thinks his own inheritance deserves honest handling is not its enemy. He is the one taking it seriously.

Asking for the text is not hostility to your faith. It is a request that your faith carry its own weight. If it is anti-Christian to check the footnote, then every believer who ever opened a Bible and wondered whether the translation held up is a heretic. You know better.

Then you are a communist. You hate this country and you want the government running everything.

This one almost writes its own rebuttal.

I have argued in public that illegal aliens should be deported and that entering this country illegally does not create a right to stay. I have argued that denaturalizing someone who lied on an application is immigration enforcement and not targeting. I have argued that the Constitution limits government power and that we are not becoming Nazi Germany, which is the kind of sentence no communist writes.

I also run a small construction company. I make payroll. I eat the cost when a material price jumps and the customer will not pay for it. This very week I wrote an argument that small businesses win by estimating accurately, controlling expenses and doing ordinary things well, and not by pretending the market does not exist. That is not what a comrade writes. That is what someone writes who has lived inside the market and respects it.

Communism means the state owns the means of production and one party runs the state. I believe in private property, contracts, enforcement of the law and consequences. If that is communism, the word has lost its meaning.

And notice the contradiction you are asking me to carry. A communist is hostile to organized religion of every kind. An Islamist wants one religion to govern the state. I cannot be a godless Marxist and a man who wants one faith in charge. Pick one.

And you are an Islamist. You defend them every chance you get.

I will keep this short because it deserves little more.

This week I wrote that Washington should end the waiver that shields Saudi Arabia from the consequences of its own religious persecution. I wrote that the kingdom bans churches, that American policy has named the offense for twenty years and done nothing, and that public churches in Saudi Arabia should be a stated condition of the relationship. I closed with the line “Open the churches.”

An Islamist does not write that. An Islamist does not cite the Commission on International Religious Freedom against a Gulf monarchy. The charge is not just false. It is the opposite of the record.

So here is what the three labels have in common. They contradict each other, and they do not describe me. They describe an enemy list. I was filed under all three because I disagreed with the person doing the filing. You do not answer the argument. You assign the person a category, and the category answers for you.

Fine. But look at what is happening. The Democrats are taking over in the midterms. That is where all of this leads. You helped it along.

Now we reach the part that interests me most, because it is the part with numbers.

Here is what happened. The party in the White House lost Congressional seats, as it almost always does. Brookings counts 20 of 22 midterm elections from 1938 on in which the president’s party lost ground in the House. [1] The two exceptions were 1998, when an impeachment effort backfired, and 2002, when the country rallied after the September 11 attacks. [1] Midterms are a referendum on the party in power. When voters are unhappy, they punish whoever holds the office.

That is why the result is predictable, and you are right about that much. CBS News’ Battleground Tracker had Democrats on track for 229 House seats before Election Day. [2] News outlets are now projecting a Democratic House, and control of the Senate was still undecided as results came in. [3] A pattern that old does not need a conspiracy or a conversion to explain it.

Somebody has to be responsible. Somebody wins because they did something.

That is the assumption I want to challenge, because the recent record cuts against it.

Look at how the big swings actually happened. In 2006 President Bush stood at 38 percent approval and Republicans lost 30 House seats. [6] In 2010 President Obama stood at 45 percent and Democrats lost 63 seats. [6] Gallup’s tally of midterms from 1946 to 2014 shows an average loss of 37 seats when the president’s approval is under 50 percent, against 14 when it is above. [6] The loss tracks the president’s standing. It does not track the genius of the other side.

In many of these cycles the winning party did not need to win anyone over. It needed to be the alternative. FiveThirtyEight’s review of the research describes a “presidential penalty,” in which some voters switch sides to check the White House, and it notes that Catalist, a Democratic data firm, estimated that up to 89 percent of the swing between 2016 and 2018 came from such switchers. [4] The same review points to lower midterm turnout among groups that lean toward the president’s party, so the out-party’s voters make up more of the electorate. [4] None of that requires the winning side to pass a bill, win a debate or change a single mind.

That is the part my friend misses. Congress has shifted power again and again in the recent past without the winners doing a damn thing to earn it. They showed up and the other side stumbled. The voters did the rest. If power moves because a president’s numbers sag, then the winning party’s virtue, its platform and its friends in the commentariat have very little to do with it.

And if the winners barely have to act, think how little a man at a small desk in Colorado has to do with it. I did not move a House seat. I did not make a single swing voter in a single district. To believe otherwise you would have to believe that my opinions about the Bible and the Constitution are a leading indicator of American politics. I am flattered. I am also a realist.

You keep talking about seats. The midterms are not the point. They are a symptom. The trajectory runs to the apocalyptic end of the United States. We will still be a spot on the map, but we will not be a global power or even a regional one.

Now we are at the real claim. It is a prophecy, and this series has a standard for prophecies. Name the prediction. Name the date. Name the test. Then see what happened.

Start with the scale of the thing you say is ending. SIPRI reports that the United States spent about $954 billion on its military in 2025, roughly a third of the world total of $2,887 billion. [9] China, the nearest rival, spent an estimated $336 billion, about 12 percent of the total. [9] Russia spent an estimated $190 billion. [9] The United States outspent China by nearly three to one. A country that spends as much as the next several nations combined has not been reduced to a spot on the map.

I concede that spending is not the only measure of power. It does not capture industrial capacity, readiness, debt or the will of a population, and a sober person should worry about every one of those. I do. But worry is not the same as prophecy. Real problems call for repair, and doom calls for nothing, because doom assumes the repair will never come.

This time is different. We are finished.

Every generation says that, and every generation turns out to be wrong in the same way.

After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, the alarm spread that America had fallen behind, and a missile gap became a campaign theme. In the 1970s the country was told it faced a crisis of confidence. In the 1980s Japan was going to buy the place, and the Japanese purchase of Rockefeller Center and Pebble Beach was treated as a verdict. In 1987 Paul Kennedy warned of imperial overstretch. Japan then spent a decade in stagnation. The United States went on to a long expansion, and in 1991 it fought a major war without a draft or a tax increase. [5] After the 2008 financial crisis the prophets were back, and Kennedy himself revisited the thesis. [5] Each wave attached itself to a rising rival or a domestic crisis, and none produced the predicted collapse in standing. [5]

That is the pattern, and it is the same pattern I described in The Apocalypse Is Always Coming. The end is always near, the date is always flexible and the evidence is always whatever happened last week. A midterm swing fits that mold perfectly. It is dramatic, it is recent and it is easy to attach to a story about ruin. But a party losing the House has been routine for more than eighty years, and the republic survived all of it.

Notice, too, that the Harbinger’s prophecy needs the midterms to be a turning point. They are not. If power in Congress shifts when a president slips in the polls, as the numbers above show, then the shift tells us about a president’s standing and tells us nothing about the fate of a nation. You cannot read the end of a country in the swing of a pendulum that has been swinging since 1938.

You can explain it away all you want. But you do not see your side hurting the faithful.

Let me give you your best argument, because it is better than the three labels.

I concede the cost. Criticizing your own side is expensive, but the alternative is worse. A movement that cannot hear honest criticism from its friends will hear it eventually from its enemies, and by then it will be too late to take it as help.

Honesty about your own side is also what makes the rest of your argument credible. If I only attacked the people I disliked, you would be right to ignore me. Because I attack the claims I think are wrong wherever I find them, including on the right, you should be willing to believe me when I say a particular claim is right.

So you admit you are on the other side.

I admit that I am on the side of the evidence, and I admit that I was never invited to choose between your tribe and the other one.

Here is what a friend owes a friend. The argument. If I am wrong about the Bible, show me the verse. If I am wrong about the Constitution, show me the clause. If I am anti-Christian, point to the sentence where I attack Christians instead of a claim. If I am pro-communist, point to the line where I call for the state to seize anything. If I am an Islamist, explain the Saudi post.

You will not be able to do any of that, and that is the whole story. The labels are not a conclusion you reached. They are a substitute for the argument you do not have. And the midterms are not a road I paved. They are a pattern that was running long before either of us had an opinion.

Where the Anger Comes From

I do not think my friend is stupid, and I do not think he is cruel. I think he is a man living through flux, and flux is hard on anyone who built his sense of the world on a country that held still.

Look at what has moved in his lifetime. The culture has moved: what people say in public, what they celebrate, what they stopped being embarrassed by. Politics has moved: parties have rearranged themselves and the neighbors he once argued with over coffee now argue with him across a divide of contempt. The law has moved: courts rewrite what is permitted, legislatures pass and repeal, and the rules he learned as settled keep getting reopened. Law enforcement has moved with it, so even the question of who keeps order and how looks different from what he grew up with. When all four shift at once, a person feels the ground tilt. Anger and anxiety are the natural result.

He is not alone. Pew found in 2023 that 58 percent of Americans say life for people like them is worse than it was 50 years ago. That includes 72 percent of Republicans and 43 percent of Democrats, and 65 percent of adults 50 and older. [8] The feeling crosses party lines. It runs strongest among the old and the right, which is where my friend sits.

That is real, and I take it seriously. But a feeling of loss is not evidence of destruction. The good old days are a place we visit in memory, edited by time. Every decade he pines for was itself a decade of upheaval to the people living in it, from the Sputnik panic to the malaise of the 1970s. None of them felt like a golden age while they were happening. They feel golden now because the outcome is known and the worry is gone.

Here is the trap. The Harbinger is trying to hold on to a nation that no longer exists, and in some respects never did in the form he remembers. That cannot be done. So the loss gets converted into a prophecy: if the country I knew is gone, then the country itself must be ending. That does not follow. A country can change profoundly and keep going, as this one has done more than once. Change is not collapse. The nation of his memory is not coming back, and the nation of his fear is not coming either. What we have is the harder thing, a country in motion that needs steady hands and not a prophet.

The Verdict on Prophecy

Prophecy has a two-thousand-year record, and it is a record of misses. The New Testament itself put the end inside the first century. Mark 13:30 and Matthew 24:34 say that this generation shall not pass until these things are fulfilled. Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4:17 of those “which are alive and remain” being caught up to meet the Lord. [7] That generation died. The end did not come. Every date-setter since has missed too, and each one has been quietly reinterpreted by the next.

That is how the genre works. The prediction is dramatic, the timeline is vague and the evidence is whatever bad news arrived this week. When the date passes, the prophet announces that the date was misunderstood. A claim built to survive every outcome is not knowledge. It is blather.

The Harbinger’s forecast has exactly that architecture. It names no date. It names no test. It offers no mechanism beyond a feeling that things are going badly. It joins the long line of failed prophecy, Christian and secular, ancient and modern, and it earns the same verdict. Prophetic utterance is not insight. It is confident noise.

Forecasting is a real discipline, and it works the opposite way. It publishes probabilities, names the dates, shows the evidence and takes the loss when it is wrong. I will hold the Harbinger to that standard the day he is ready to meet it. Until then, his prophecy gets the same treatment I give Mark 13.