Death of a Conservative

Mike Adams, In Memoriam

The first time I saw Mike Adams speak in my town, I remember we were sitting in one of the worst rooms my local U could have picked to host him in. It was a basement classroom, small capacity, mediocre lighting. My father, one of the profs there, called it “the dungeon.” He was annoyed, but not that surprised. And when Mike came bounding down the aisle, we knew a good time would be had regardless.

That was 2008. It feels like a lifetime ago. It was the dawning of the age of Obama. Twitter was a newborn. Facebook was barely out of diapers. I was an awkward, precocious homeschooled high schooler, tagging along with Dad or Mom or both whenever College Republicans invited a celebrity pundit to town. Over the years, I would snag keepsake photos with Phyllis Schlafly, Michelle Malkin, Roy Moore (yes, I know). I was a proud conservative purist, complete with Ronald Reagan poster on the wall.

Mike Adams was a new name, but my dad was a big fan and had made sure I read his Townhall archives. I was quickly hooked. He was sharp, brash, and irreverent, but most importantly, he was implacable in his commitment to conservative values. In particular, he was a tireless warrior for free speech, freedom of religious conscience, and above all, the right to life. Much of his speaking, including the talk he gave in our U’s “dungeon” by invitation from the campus pro-life group, brought these threads together, raising awareness of cases where pro-life speech had been attacked or suppressed. (This old National Review article by David French highlights just one of many, involving two women who peacefully protested a performance of The Vagina Monologues. At the time, French and Adams were close collaborators.)

In that talk, as in every talk I would see Mike give, he was a live wire, a fount of energy, a man in perpetual motion. It seemed inconceivable then, as it still seems inconceivable now, that he would ever stop. But as I write these words, it has been a year to the day since Mike Adams was found dead in his home, by a single self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Mike’s style was not everyone’s tea. Greg Lukianoff, in his very warm last Christmas tribute, traces its evolution back to when Greg loaned Mike a copy of Lenny Bruce’s book How to Talk Dirty and Influence People:

Mike later told me he had read the book at my recommendation, thought it was extremely funny, and explained that it inspired him to reshape his approach to how he would battle for his conservative beliefs: He would develop a more irreverent, jokey, but also in-your-face style, in the tradition of the proto-“shock jock,” Lenny Bruce.

For my entire life, the role of the “provocateur” — the gadfly who pokes at society in an outrageous way quite specifically to produce a reaction — was considered a legitimate, even necessary (if not always well-liked) societal role. It was believed that provocateurs, comedians, and edgy social commentators helped keep society from becoming too complacent, too self-certain, or even too partisan. The tamer cousin of the provocateur, the edgy social political commentator, went through a kind of golden age in the 2000s in the forms of Jon Stewart, Dave Chapelle, Bill Maher, Dennis Miller, and Stephen Colbert, who launched his show with a character based on popular edgy conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly. It wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it was a style that was recognized, understood, and even respected. 

It worked. Mike was unapologetically scathing in his polemics against pro-choice apologetics, militant gay activism, and jack-booted feminism. At times, even his closest friends winced over the colorful way he spun these polemics. But as I heard one friend put it, “I would have two reactions. I would think ‘I can’t believe he said that.’ Then next moment I would think, ‘I wish I’d thought of that.’”

I never minded it, myself, although in hindsight I do take issue with one tactic, namely Mike’s habit of doxxing people who came at him by e-mail and inviting his supporters to write to them. I knew Mike well enough to know he would never have done this with malicious intent or imagined that his readers would threaten anyone violently. This is not to defend doxxing, even “limited” doxxing of a private e-mail address. But I believe, mixed with his recklessness, Mike had a kind of innocence about him, an innocence that’s hard to describe to those who never got to know the man behind the persona. As we all tragically came to realize, that brash Lenny Bruce exterior masked deep vulnerability, and the hatred and death threats that came Mike’s own way hit him harder than he ever betrayed openly.

One might have predicted that Adams would have been a natural Trumpite when 2016 hit. In fact, I can attest that he was vocally Never Trump. Specifically, he was appalled by Trump’s demeaning language towards women. This will not compute for those determined to brand Mike as a misogynist. But it’s the truth. Likewise, those determined to brand him as a racist based on his strong opposition to last summer’s George Floyd protests might have assumed he would dismiss or perhaps even gloat over Floyd’s death. This would also be false. Mike was openly shocked and distressed by the footage when it first leaked, writing on his Facebook wall that he hoped justice would be served.

Mike’s instinctive distress at the manner of Floyd’s death was consistent with his lifelong passion for the rights of the vulnerable, from unborn children to men behind prison bars. In fact, as he shared often, it was in an Ecuadorian jail that he was first shaken out of his angry atheism and set on the path to Christianity. As a young visiting professor, he was given a tour of the squalid prison camp and witnessed horrific abuse firsthand—open sewage, food rotting, a young man in a corner being beaten within an inch of his life. The beating stopped once the guard was told “Stop, we have visitors!” The look on the prisoner’s face as he and Mike made eye contact would etch itself indelibly into Mike’s memory. When he stumbled back out, gagging from the stench, he looked up and saw a dingy statue of the Virgin Mary presiding over the sad scene. For several minutes, he simply stood staring up at her. Then he whispered aloud, “I was wrong.”

He would later say that was his first breakthrough, but it wasn’t enough to push him all the way. After several more years in an uneasy agnostic limbo state, Mike had a harrowing encounter on Texas’s Death Row with convicted murderer John Paul Penry. Penry was severely retarded, but he told Mike he had read the entire Bible over his years behind bars. Mike was dumbfounded. Before he walked away in shock, they shared a “prison handshake,” palm to palm with the glass in between. Soon after, Mike bought a Bible and read it through, for the first time. (This encounter later yielded a research paper on the execution of the mentally retarded.)

Mike was likewise a latecomer to the pro-life cause. He often told on himself the story of how he lingered in a lukewarm “pro-life with rape exception” phase, only to be humiliatingly challenged by a girlfriend who knew a woman conceived in rape. He had no self-consciousness about sharing this. He wanted the world to know that he had been wrong.

Mike was gentle with people who were ambivalent and confused on the pro-life question, and nothing gave him more joy than being able to persuade someone out of a pro-choice frame. At the same time, he was not gentle with debate opponents like self-styled “Christian” abortion doctor Willie Parker. In response to an illustration where Parker presented himself as the Good Samaritan, Mike had this to say:

I agree that the Good Samaritan is a good parable, because I often ask the question who is my neighbor. And I’ll answer that question for you right now: The unborn is my neighbor. And you notice something about that parable. When someone was robbed and beaten and lying by the side of the road, you know what the Good Samaritan didn’t do? The Good Samaritan didn’t stop by the side of the road and slit his throat, and slowly and methodically dismember him. I believe that the Good Samaritan parable is a pro-life parable, and I don’t appreciate it being hijacked in the name of God. That is obscene.

There’s so much more I could share here, so many things from my own memory and the memory of other people who actually knew Mike Adams. His love of teaching. His love of children. His particular tenderness towards the handicapped, which inspired a particular anger whenever he spoke about selective abortion. In one Facebook post, he wrote about a brief encounter at the beach with a girl who lispingly wished him a “bwessed day.” He took it as a reminder “that our flaws do not negate our humanity. They reveal it.”

Mike never despised anyone destitute, anyone lost and desperate. He couldn’t despise such people, because in his own words he knew that he was “never more than two or three bad decisions away from being in their shoes.” Here, also from his Facebook, he writes about an encounter with a homeless man:

Today, I gave money to a panhandler for the first time in quite a long while. I’m not boasting of my generosity with this post. To the contrary, I almost never give to panhandlers. I selfishly use the fact that most of them are undeserving as a rationalization for avoiding nearly all of them. But something moved me to give to this young man who was apparently disabled and quite possibly drug addicted. After I slipped him the bill, a brief conversation ensued. It ended with me sharing the gospel with this image bearer and telling him that Jesus was real and that Jesus loves him and had a purpose in his life. It is quite likely that the money I gave him will be used for an illicit purpose. But it is possible that the words that passed between us will bear fruit. I intend to keep looking for him and engaging him. Charity should never be something we do when we are having a bad day and need to feel better about ourselves. It should be attached to real relationships. And it should be the [sic] followed by prayer that it will be used according to a kingdom purpose. I hope I can do a better job of this in 2020. I could hardly do worse than I have in the past.

I couldn’t tell you what happened to Mike. Nobody could. I suspect COVID had a lot to do with it. I know the lockdowns discouraged him deeply. I know the distress it gave him to see the cost in economic devastation, shuttered churches, lost community, and especially (ironically) lost life by suicide. I know it grieved him that he couldn’t be with the students and friends he loved at the Christian summer worldview training seminars where he was a fixture. I know the sense of panic he felt as he looked around him, the sense that he no longer recognized the America he loved.

Friends can also attest that the cycle of banter and backlash was taking its toll. Like everyone else, Mike wound up joining Twitter. But wiser heads advised him to get off the platform, a platform I believe he didn’t really understand. He had fought free speech cases in court and won. He had played Lenny Bruce for so long and won. He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand how a single impulsive tweet, like the tweet he made venting about North Carolina governor Roy Cooper’s strictures in “blaccent,” could send him to forced early retirement, just like that.

All this was surely in the mix, no doubt mingled with clinical and physiological factors that only his closest circle was privy to. But even over the brief time I knew him, I felt I’d caught a glimpse. I remember the summer we spent time together, the suicide of Robin Williams was fresh in my mind. It had given me new eyes, new insight. I never would have guessed Mike’s darkness was that deep. But I could recognize a sad clown when I met one.

Mike was loved, in his last days. He had friends who prayed over him, friends who tried to call him, friends who banged on his door on July 23rd. He was engaged to be married. I say all this so that I’m not misunderstood. Mike Adams made his choice. I said as much at the time when I wrote my eulogy for The American Conservative. But I said this, as well:

…[T]here is no softening the cruel fact that in the end, Mike was his own perpetrator and victim together. There never can be with a death like this, not without peddling platitudes at the expense of truth. Nevertheless, in a man’s final act of despair, all who drove him to that end are implicated, whether by their speech or their failure to speak.

Will I see Mike again? I hope so. With all my heart, I hope it. With all my heart, I pray it. I pray it as I watch the eulogy Mike gave at the death of his mother, a saintly prayer warrior whose unflagging charity lit the spark that became the flame of his own life. I pray it as I watch the eulogy he gave at the death of his father, a lifelong atheist who had a deathbed conversion. Mike ministered to him to the end, sharing the Christian gospel, praying for his salvation. In his final moments, nurses reported he could be heard quietly singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

Mike’s legacy lives on. His witness lives on. His family and friends live on. But I can’t think of him without an ache in my soul. I can’t remember the good times, the puns, the easy conversation, the image of him at the center of a crowd, without a sense of beautiful things lost, good things passing away. Yet I cannot believe Mike is lost. I cannot allow myself to believe it.

But I miss him. I just miss him.