The Humility of Christmas thumbnail

The Humility of Christmas

By Jerry Newcombe

Winston Churchill was a man of great wit. Much of that wit came in the form of insulting barbs. It was once reported, “When Winston Churchill was told that Clement Attlee [former British prime minister] is a modest man, he said: ‘No doubt he is. And Mr. Attlee has plenty to be modest about.’”

But all joking aside, genuine humility is a beautiful and God-like trait. The first Christmas was really quite humble.

Perhaps that is why Christmas resonates in the hearts of many, even many non-religious people…because of its utter humility.

Of course, we Christians believe God became a man in Jesus Christ. But when He came, He didn’t come in pomp and circumstance, living in an ivory palace. He came in a humble and lowly way.

He didn’t even sleep in a bed that first Christmas. He was laid in a manger—a feeding trough for animals—in a smelly stable. Hay served as the baby’s mattress.

He did it voluntarily, as the Apostle Paul notes: “Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”

One of the verses of the classic 19th century Christmas carol “What Child Is This?” asks, “Why lies He in such mean estate, / Where ox and ass are feeding?” At that time, “mean” meant, “Of little value; low in worth or estimation.”

Here is a lesson to us all. No one in this world, no matter how lowly, no matter what side of the tracks they come from, would find Jesus unrelatable. He is accessible to all.

Mary was a Jewish teenage girl, maybe 13 or 14. She was betrothed to be married to Joseph, which entailed more of a legal commitment to marriage than our modern day engagement.

They lived in Nazareth of Galilee in Israel, which was under the thumb of the Roman Empire. Later on, when one of the 12 apostles, Nathanael, first learned that Jesus was from Nazareth, he exclaimed, “Nazareth? Can anything good come from Nazareth?” It was viewed as backwoods.

The angel Gabriel appeared to Mary to let her know she was chosen to fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy from seven centuries before: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” Immanuel means “God with us.”

In her “Magnificat,” her song of praise to God, humble Mary is grateful to the Lord, “for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.  For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed.”

She has indeed been called blessed. Mary, the Mother of Jesus, was the greatest woman ever born. Even National Geographic had a cover story on her in 2015, calling her “the world’s most powerful woman.”

But through it all, Mary remained humble. Death entered our world through pride. Life came through Christ. Humble Mary played a key role in Christ’s coming. When she received the startling news that the Holy Spirit would come upon her so that she would give birth to the Son of God, she replied in humble obedience, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”

Why that first Christmas? About 30 years later, Jesus Himself explained the whole reason He came: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” And He came in humility.

Humility doesn’t always come easy to most of us. My long-time pastor, Dr. D. James Kennedy, once quipped: “I hope you all heard my last sermon on humility. It was a masterpiece.”

True humility is beautiful, and it is extolled in the Bible repeatedly as a virtue pleasing to God. For example, James says: “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”

When George Washington was a young man, he wrote out in his own handwriting a Christmas poem he saw in an English magazine that highlights the humility of Christmas. Some of the words include: “Assist me Muse divine to sing the morn, / On which the Savior of mankind was born; / …. Resign a while his glorious throne above. /  Beneath our form every woe sustain….That Deity should stoop to our disguise! / That man recovered should regain the skies!”

This Christmas season, with all of its hustles and bustles and overstimulation and stress, I think it’s good to stop and reflect on the humbleness of that first Christmas. As the 1858 Christmas Carol, “See Amid the Winter’s Snow,” exhorts us:  “Teach, O teach us, Holy Child, / By Thy face so meek and mild, / Teach us to resemble Thee, / In Thy sweet humility.”

Jerry Newcombe, D.Min.

Why is DHS ignoring a Muslim-only migrant shelter at the U.S. border? thumbnail

Why is DHS ignoring a Muslim-only migrant shelter at the U.S. border?

By Jihad Watch

DHS appears to be interested only in hounding domestic dissidents.


Why Isn’t Homeland Security Monitoring A Muslim-Only Immigrant Shelter At The US Border?

by Todd Bensman, The Federalist, December 6, 2022:

A shelter in Tijuana for U.S.-bound Muslim immigrants exemplifies the Biden administration’s dangerous mismanagement of the border crisis.

In October, U.S. Border Patrol caught another nine border-crossing immigrants who were on the FBI’s terrorism watch list, adding to the already record-breaking 98 during the just-ended fiscal 2022 and 14 during the prior fiscal year.

Those 121 suspected terrorist border crossings should strike President Joe Biden’s homeland security establishment and the general public as a “system blinking red” moment, to requote the infamous 9/11 Commission Report line about failures to act on threat information.

But my recent fact-finding trip to Mexico’s first and only shelter that expressly caters to U.S.-bound Muslim immigrants indicated Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sees no blinking red lights amid this current mass-migration border crisis.

In June 2022, the San Diego-based Latina Muslim Foundation noticed significant enough numbers of U.S.-bound travelers from the Islamic world to justify opening the Albergue Assabil/Mesquijta Taybah shelter in a two-story, 8,000-square-foot former nightclub in Tijuana just two blocks from the border wall, which all who stay there intend to bypass one way or another. The shelter serves as a waystation for 30 to 140 immigrants at a time coming from Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Somalia, Chechnya, and other regions in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia where terrorist organizations operate.

Latina Muslim Foundation Director Sonia Garcia told me she is concerned that Islamic terrorists may use her Tijuana shelter and does her best to ferret them out during interviews. She’ll even call in Mexican law enforcement authorities to investigate deceptive and suspicious persons. Mexican authorities recommended that she reject two of them for shelter assistance on terrorism grounds.

Read more.

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

President Donald J. Trump is, without question, a Philosemite! thumbnail

President Donald J. Trump is, without question, a Philosemite!

By Dr. Rich Swier

Philosemitism is a notable interest in, respect for, and appreciation of the Jewish people, their history, and the influence of Judaism, particularly on the part of a non-Jew, like Donald J. Trump and his family.

In the aftermath of World War II, philosemitism saw a great increase throughout Europe following the Holocaust, reshaping the relationship between Jews and European societies.

President Donald J. Trump, by his actions while in office proved himself to be a Philosemite and has advanced Philosemitism while in office in two important ways:

  1. By moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, thereby showing that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.
  2. Making the Abraham Accords U.S. National Policy.

During his presidency President Trump had Israel’s and their Arab neighbors best interests in mind. He and his administration brought peace to the Middle East. He opened the door to dialogue between Arab and Jew. He lead by example.

To this day, President Donald J. Trump remains a strong believer in Philosemitism. His return to the presidency will result in even more love for the Jewish people globally.

Prove us wrong.

©Dr. Rich Swier. All rights reserved.

My Twilight Zone: Past, Present and Future thumbnail

My Twilight Zone: Past, Present and Future

By Howard Rotberg

The past cannot alter the present. Holocaust museums have not affected young Islamists who don’t believe it occurred. And the future?


The American television series was called “The Twilight Zone” written by and hosted by one Rod Serling. It was a long time ago but I remember it like it was yesterday.

The meaning of “Twilight Zone” according to Your Dictionary is “the mental state between reality and fantasy” or “An area of ambiguity between two distinct states or conditions” So, Serling’s dramas told stories of weird events and alternate worlds.

The episode in question, “No Time Like the Past” was shown on March 7, 1963; it was season 4, Episode 10, and it was one of several different episodes about the possibility of time travel, or the travel backwards or forwards in time. I was almost 12 years old, already a voracious reader, and fan of Twilight Zone – a much more intellectual drama than most on the television.

Serling was born to a Jewish family in Syracuse, New York. His father was a grocer who lost his business during the Great Depression, and later became a butcher. Query – what was the effect on the son as an 8 year old to see his father lose his business? . Would difficult events take him back to the financial catastrophe; would he be prone to a type of catastrophic thinking where small issues get linked to the larger catastrophes of the past and so blur the lines between fact and fiction?

He enlisted in the army right out of high school, during the Second World War, and was disappointed that he was not sent to Europe as he wanted to fight Hitler; instead he was sent to the Pacific theatre and while at first was undistinguished in his military service, he eventually showed acts of heroism Serling saw a lot of death and severe injuries among his fellow troops; he himself received only minor injuries but he witnessed much death in his unit leading to mental trauma.

After the war he began writing first for radio and then for the growing television industry, culminating in his work writing most of the episodes of The Twilight Zone..

Serling’s opening narration for this episode was as follows:

“Exit one Paul Driscoll, a creature of the twentieth century. He puts to a test a complicated theorem of space-time continuum, but he goes a step further, or tries to. Shortly, he will seek out three moments of the past in a desperate attempt to alter the present, one of the odd and fanciful functions in a shadowland known as the Twilight Zone.”

The plot for “No Time Like the Past” is summarized by Wikipedia partly as follows:

Disgusted with 20th century problems such as worldwarsatomic weapons and radioactive poisoning, the character Paul Driscoll solicits the help of his colleague Harvey and uses a time machine, intent to remake the present by altering past events.

Paul first travels to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and attempts to warn a Hiroshima police captain about the atomic bomb, but the captain dismisses him as insane. Paul then travels to a Berlin hotel room to assassinate Adolf Hitler in August 1939 (immediately before the outbreak of World War II the following month), but is interrupted when a housekeeper knocks on his door and later calls two SS guards to his room because she sees him with a rifle in front of a window looking out where Hitler will be speaking. On his third stop, Paul tries to change the course of the Lusitania on May 6, 1915 to avoid being torpedoed by a GermanU-boat, but the ship’s captain questions his credibility.

Paul accepts the hypothesis that the past cannot be changed. He then uses the time machine to go to a small town in Indiana in 1881, resolving not to make any changes, but just to live out his life free of the problems of the modern age. But despite this, he gets involved in events with catastrophic results. Accordingly, Paul understands that “the past is sacred” and belongs to those who are native to it. He knows too much of the future and fears that he will inevitably cause a lot of trouble. He returns to his own time and declares that instead of continuing to fixate upon the past, he will now try to do something to positively impact the future.

The unsuccessful attempts to prevent death by changing history made a big impression on me. I fantasized about being able to successfully assassinate Hitler. My father was a survivor of Auschwitz where his parents and then 8 year old sister were murdered in the gas chambers. My father in those years did not talk about his experiences and I felt it was wrong to try to ask him questions. The silence enveloping those with experience of the Shoah was quite universal so it was something I just accepted. My curiosity of what happened and why was channelled into my reading, but in those years, there was yet to be a proper history of the Shoah written and accessible to me. All I could find was Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which was essentially a military history, and a book given to my father by his uncle who had escaped Poland to Canada in the ‘30s, a very sad book with many graphic photos of dead Jews, called The Black Book of Polish Jewry, assembled by a group of authors. The important books by Raul Hillberg and Lucy S. Dawidowicz were just being published while I was at university.

The show’s warning that instead of fixating on the past we try to positively impact the future, had a special meaning for me. In a sense I did become fixated on the history, on the basis of the admonition that those who do not learn from the past are compelled to relive it.

After high school, I therefore spent three years studying history at University of Toronto before switching to Law School there, which was my father’s suggestion. But in those three years, I was one of a handful of students studying the Holocaust through the lens of cultural history and the history of ideologies. I realized that understanding ideologies, such as antisemitism, nativism, racism, communism, etc. was the key to understanding why people could commit the most evil acts..

I eventually understood that I could go back in time, not to assassinate Hitler or otherwise change the course of history, but I could study history and write about history. But unlike the character in the show who says that the past is sacred, I did not think that it belonged only to those who are native to it. History belonged to those intelligent and learned enough to understand it.

The fantasy of the 11 year old about taking a time machine back in time to kill Hitler and prevent the Holocaust, became replaced with taking the knowledge gained in books and personal accounts of the victims to my task of warning about a Second Holocaust, this time in our historic homeland.

Was this audacious task just another turn at catastrophic thinking? Was it disrespectful to link one set of unique historical events to another? Would survivors or the family of survivors be offended? Would the Holocaust deniers and Islamists heap scorn on me for exaggerating current events by calling them, too, a Holocaust? Would I be accused of joining those who compare the Shoah with various current events for the purpose of downplaying those tragic events which should never be compared with other lesser events?

When Israel made the terrible mistake of trying to make peace through the ill-advised Oslo Process, with the resulting terrorism against its civilians and growing support for its genocidal enemies, I decided to write a book about a professor who starts to realize that a Second Holocaust was underway – this time by Arabs, islamists, and leftists who promoted alliances under the rubric of “intersectionality”. In The Second Catastrophe: A Novel about a Book and its Author, i wrote about a fictional professor of history, who aims to alert the world to a Second Holocaust and therefore impact a present and a future where Iran threatens to fire nuclear weapons at Israel Iran’s with its terrorist proxies, and Hezbollah, along with the genocidal Palestinian Authority, surrounding Israel and firing missiles and other weapons at Jewish civilians.

And so, I had a susceptibility to seeing the world somewhat negatively; in fact I too, like Serling, developed a kind of “catastrophic thinking” which came out in my novel, where I had the professor worried about a Second Shoah and writing a book to warn the world.

My cousin’s wife in Tel Aviv spent many years helping Holocaust survivors write their memoirs, which is another way to help preserve the facts of history by going back in time to record them all.

I remember one time that I was in Israel and I heard about a debate going on whether Yad Vashem and other historians should not rest until they can put a name on every victim, or whether it was a mis-use of finances and a task with diminishing returns.

People who live full time in Israel and daily face terror cannot afford the mental and emotional stress of catastrophic thinking, which would leave one with a tendency to the mental illness of depression.

In fact, contrary to my assumption,Israelis have done well on the annual survey of the happiest nations on earth, being the World Happiness Report with data from the Gallup organization.

Israel this year ranked as the 11th happiest nation, ahead of Australia, Ireland, the United States and Canada.

Why are Israelis so happy when Iran has promised to nuke them when it gets the nuclear bomb. Moreover, in the meantime Iran supplies weapons to Hamas and Hezbollah, who are pledged to destroy Israel. Then the Europeans and the United Nations take seriously the Palestinian Authority, as a “peace partner” and the recipient of financial aid when those nations should know better, because of what happened in Gaza when Israel gave up land for “peace”.

I posit that people are happier when they understand reality and understand that reality sometimes demands action, rather than repressing thoughts of fear and denying uncomfortable thoughts, and having their youth and intellectuals favor the terrorists, which is exactly what has happened in Belgium (17), United Kingdom (18) and France (20).

I think that France is now paying the price in terms of happiness for its appeasement of Islamist immigrants.

Is Israel on a dangerous path by having leftists and Islamists in the governing coalition? Will the Israelis react to this situation with a more catastrophic thinking and fall down the list of happiest nations?

We are all in a Twilight Zone if we think we can alter History, which cannot be done by a non-existent time travel machine, nor in Zuckerberg’s virtual meta world; It can only be done by realistically changing the present and future with a foundation of accurately depicting the past.

The history of our People is replete with catastrophic events, which like the character on television we cannot change. The time is near that Israel might have to attack Iran before Iran perfects nuclear weapons. Israel might have the terrible choice of whether to lose many thousands of people, after a pre-emptive attack or millions of people after Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Palestinian Arabs act first with nuclear weapons. Israel must make the world aware that Israel is the past, present and future of the Jewish people; we can’t change the history of the Nazis and the Shoah, but we all learn from History. And, as Jews, we learn fromTorah the story of the Amalekites.

We can be happy as long as we are prepared to do what is necessary. We can’t rely on those who will be part of the future to change the present, in some kind of time travel. Every Jew, in Israel or the Diaspora, must understand his or her obligation to first publicize, and then modify, the real threats that exist and are emanating from the Islamists and their leftist “woke” friends.

We know that we are now in the Twilight Zone – the past cannot alter the present. All the Holocaust memorials and museums have not affected young Islamists who say they don’t believe the facts of the Holocaust.

Even in America, a nationwide survey in 2020 among Millenials and Generation Z’ers (under 40) showed a lack of knowledge including 1 int 10 who did not recall having heard the word “Holocaust” before, 63% did not know that 6 million Jews hadbeen murdered, and half of respondents could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto.

Just 90 percent of respondents said they believed that the Holocaust happened. Seven percent were not sure, and 3 percent denied that it happened. One of the most disturbing revelations, the survey noted, is that 11 percent of respondents believe Jews caused the Holocaust. The number climbs to 19 percent in New York, the state with the largest Jewish population.

A number of studies have disclosed the high prevalence of antisemitism among Muslims around the world. As Muslims flock to the West, the West must make certain that immigrants are vetted to ascertain that they do not see themselves as perpetrators of Jihadist tactics to achieve their “world-wide caliphate”.

I invite you all to contemplate and publicly discuss past, present and future. We can do so, without losing a place near the top of the happiness index; in fact that will be easier if we get out of the Twilight Zone and work with reality.

©Howard Rotberg. All rights reserved.

Know What Drives Anti-Semites Like Ye? Just Peel the Onion of the Human Psyche! thumbnail

Know What Drives Anti-Semites Like Ye? Just Peel the Onion of the Human Psyche!

By Joan Swirsky

When I watch TV with my husband Steve, a former athlete, I see superb ballplayers in basketball, baseball, and football exhibiting what immense discipline went into their sculpted bodies, what sacrifices they made to achieve their goals, what tremendous––almost superhuman––talent they have in effecting that three-point shot from mid-court, that spectacular triple play, that “you’ve been Mossed” catch in the endzone.

And I picture them as young boys watching Michael Jordan, Derek Jeter, Tom Brady, and saying to themselves what Steve––his team’s slugger––said to himself in 1955, when, at the age of 14, he took the 3,000-mile train ride from New Haven, CT, to Portland, OR, to compete in the Babe Ruth League World Series in the Multnomah Stadium: “I’m gonna be the next Joe DiMaggio!”

It only added to that lofty ambition when the residents of The City of Roses greeted the teenaged boys by showering red, white, and pink roses on them when they got off the train.

As it happened, the star pitcher of Steve’s team got into a fistfight and was sent home on the next train. And that left Steve to face not only the 15-year-old pitcher Mickey Lolich, who became the three-time All-Star and World Series winner for the Detroit Tigers, but also 15-year-old Al Downing, who became an ace pitcher for the NY Mets and NY Yankees (and other teams).

“I was up three times and Lolich pitched me nine pitches I couldn’t hit,” Steve told me, smiling back at the memory.

But that humbling experience didn’t discourage Steve from continuing to admire and emulate his heroes DiMaggio and Mantle and Koufax, et al, and to engage in the sports he loved…both baseball and basketball, the latter of which earned him All Connecticut and All New England status, as well as the coveted New England Championship in 1959 in high school, and subsequently to become the captain of the Dartmouth College basketball team.

At the high school New England Championship game in Boston Garden: Pictured from left to right in ‘59: Tookie Gomez, Jimmy Hill, Steve, Maurice Sykes, Lindsay Haughton, with Coach Sam Bender.

Why? “Because when you admire someone and you want to be like them,” Steve told me, “You study what they do, how they act, what they say. You try to find out what the secrets of their success are, with the goal of achieving what they’ve achieved, or at least coming close. And that goes for farmers or hedge-fund managers, ballerinas or composers or astronauts, rich or poor black or white…that goes for everyone!”

Indeed, intelligent people who play sports realize when they’re quite young that the way to achieve your goals is to emulate the people you admire…their discipline, drive, sacrifice, demeanor, behavior. And to learn the lessons that only sports, not school, teaches: humility, how to deal with disappointment with grace, how to be modest in victory, how to be grateful for the gifts of health and talent that God has given you.

YE AND KYRIE KNOW ALL THIS

Certainly, the rap star and clothing designer Ye (aka Kanye West) is not stupid, as anyone who watched his interview with Tucker Carlson saw with their own eyes. He is articulate and thoughtful. He told Carlson that he was raised by a mother he loved and a father he idolized, “the most brilliant man.” His father, he proudly stated, was a member of the Black Panthers Party, a Marxist-Leninist and black power organization founded in 1966.

Before it was founded, Blacks and Jews comprised an influential alliance, with Jews contributing significant financial aid and both moral support and concrete assistance to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and many other Black organizations fighting for equality and against racism. Not to omit their collaborative efforts to enroll Blacks to vote, for which New York residents, Jewish volunteers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were savagely murdered in 1964 in Mississippi.

Yet given this history, quite familiar to Ye, he nevertheless tweeted on October 9, 2022, that his intention was to go  Def Con 3 on Jewish people, which to most people meant to wipe out the Jews who so irritate and enrage him, and that includes the power that he apparently believes the Jews in his life––his managers, agents, handlers, doctors, et al––seem to have over him.

And while spewing this hatred, he also insisted that he was one of the “real” Jews, ostensibly referring to the Hebrew Israelite group  or cult or whatever it is.

Kyrie Irving, too, the Brooklyn Nets phenom basketball star, is, like Ye, highly intelligent and thoughtful. But on October 27, 2022, he tweeted a link to an Amazon listing page for Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America, a 2018 film based on a book of the same name, which promotes Black Hebrew Israelite ideology, apparently theorizing, as Chaim Lax spells out, that Blacks were really the first Jews.

Clearly neither of these grievance purveyors have ever seen the massive number of proud dark-skinned Israeli Jews who hail from Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen, and Ethiopia. In fact, Barry Shaw, author, journalist, and executive in the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies writes that, “white Israelis are a minority in the Jewish homeland.”

The film also includes denials that the Holocaust occurred, admiring quotes attributed to Adolf Hitler, and the vicious anti-Semite Henry Ford who claims that Jewish people worship Satan, as well as accusations that Jews controlled the Atlantic slave trade and currently control the media.

WHO ARE THE REAL VICTIMS?

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Hate Crime statistics, Jews remain the highest target of rampant racism in America, but it is rare to see any reaction from the media when Jews are assaulted, insulted, harassed, vilified, physically attacked and even murdered, not only in America but around the world. So, it was quite out of the ordinary when Ye was immediately and severely sanctioned by the advertisers who have made him a billionaire and that overnight he lost that status and was reduced––a big boo hoo here—to being worth a mere $400-million dollars

Kyrie, too, was sanctioned, suspended from playing for five games, and lost millions in advertising revenue, including from Nike, which cancelled his pricey contract. To his credit, however, he posted this tweet:

“While doing research on YHWH, I posted a Documentary that contained some false anti-Semitic statements, narratives, and language that were untrue and offensive to the Jewish Race/Religion, and I take full accountability and responsibly for my actions,” Irving wrote.” I am grateful to have a big platform to share knowledge and I want to move forward by having an open dialogue to learn more and grow from this.”

Note: YHWH, Yahweh, is the name for the God of the Israelites, which was the Hebrew name revealed to Moses in the book of Exodus.

A NATURAL ALLIANCE GONE WRONG

Why was the Black-Jewish alliance natural? Because Blacks had been slaves in Africa and America, and Jews had been slaves in Egypt for over 400 years. Blacks were always reviled minorities outside of Africa and Jews were always reviled minorities in every country they have been exiled to for the past 4,000 years, except for the United States of America, which is 246 years old, and Israel, which is on the brink of its 75th anniversary.

Even today, Blacks in the U.S. represent approximately 14 percent of the population, while Jews represent approximately 2.4 percent of the population. Blacks have been vilified, marginalized, mistrusted, and, yes, lynched and murdered, just for being Blacks. Jews have been vilified, marginalized, mistrusted, and, yes, six million murdered in cold blood  simply because they were Jews.

But instead of these two naturally simpatico minorities supporting each other, we have the larger minority, Blacks, engaging in fulminating hatred of Jews for many decades––thanks to career race hustlers and brutal anti-Semites like the pompous pontificating racists––the Devils quoting Scripture––Reverend Jesse Jackson, Reverend Al Sharpton, Reverend Louis Farrakhan, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, as well as Barack Obama, “the Squad” in the U.S. Congress, and now Ye and Kyrie, to name a teeny tiny sample of Black hatred toward Jews. All of whom have taught their acolytes to consider themselves victims!

BUT IS IT REALLY HATRED?

The human race is driven by emotion. It’s nice to fantasize that we’re driven by empiricism, facts, objective truths. But both history and everyday life contradict that fantasy. Emotion rules the day.

The Number One emotion is fear, which we all witnessed as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the globe, forced children to miss two years of schooling, destroyed many thousands of businesses, frightened millions of people into taking an experimental, DNA-altering vaccine, often with significantly dire consequences, et al.

Jews are all too familiar with the emotion of fear, as are Blacks.

The second most powerful emotion is jealousy. Most crimes––including murder––are committed in the name of this raging sentiment, and lesser crimes and everyday hostility are also caused by the monster of green-eyed envy. Basically, the person with this curse of an emotion is saying: I want what you have and the fact that you have it, and I don’t have, makes me blind with rage, makes me hate you.

On the surface, it seems obvious that what Ye and Kyrie and the Jew haters who have weighed in on their behalf are experiencing is blind jealousy. “How come,” they seem to be asking themselves, “that with all my intelligence, talent, charm, connections, good looks and money, it’s the Jews who run Hollywood and the music business and the media and me???”

Objectively, numerically, these accusations are simply not true. Here, Rory Rochman, noted speaker on Jewish rights, addresses Ye’s admitted jealousy problem with Jews. But sticking with the issue at hand, human emotions, is it really jealousy?

After jealousy, the third and hugely powerful emotion is anger, an easy emotion to access, whether it involves dealing with an irritating relative, witnessing a boyfriend who hurt your daughter’s feelings, hitting a pothole that breaks your axle, even trying to reach your doctor by pushing 2, then 4, then 7, then more horrible music.

But fear, jealousy and anger are only three layers of the psychological onion.

There is a fourth, but let’s look first at where the rage of the Blacks should really be––but isn’t.

WHO SHOULD BLACKS BE FURIOUS AT?

Who has inflicted the most harm on Blacks? In a word…Democrats.

Who fought ferociously against President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which freed 3.5 million Black slaves for all time? Democrats!

Who created the Ku Klux Klan, which hunted down, tortured, lynched, and murdered Blacks during its entire tenure (from 1865 to today)? Democrats!

Who created the Jim Crow laws which mandated racial segregation in all public facilities? Everyone from Democrat President Woodrow Wilson to Democrat Alabama Governor George Wallace (“segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”) to Virginia Democrat Senator Robert Byrd, on and on and on––all Democrats!

Who fought fiercely against the Civil Rights legislation of 1964, which dismantled Jim Crow segregation, combatted racial discrimination, removed barriers to black enfranchisement in the South that banned poll taxes, literacy tests, and other measures that effectively prevented African Americans from voting? Democrats!

IT GETS WORSE…

When all that failed to get rid of Blacks––as Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, stated as her goal––Democrats figured that the sure-fire way to keep Blacks voting for them was to destroy their families and thus insure that they remain in poverty and especially in ignorance.

To that end, they created a welfare system with the following rule: I will support you, Ms. Black Woman, with housing, food, medical care, and childcare…no matter how many babies you give birth to…with one condition: you cannot marry! If you marry, your benefits will either be substantially reduced… or eliminated!

Poof! The one-parent home was created, where Black mothers still had to work to make ends meet, where their children had no inspiring or disciplining male role models, and where single motherhood exploded from only seven percent––when the War on Poverty began in 1964 under Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson––to 23 percent today.

…AND WORSE

In the Great Northward Migration between 1910 and 1970, six-million Blacks left the rural south for the urban northeast, Midwest, and west, many of them to New York, where a criminal public school system has kept them ignorant and unemployable to this very day.

That system has “graduated” thousands upon thousands of Black students who are unable to read, calculate, or even speak coherently. Inevitably, they find work with the neighborhood people who drive fancy cars, sport Rolex watches, and have huge wads of cash on hand––pimps, organized crime figures, and drug dealers. And then they end up in prison, often for life!

And who contributes mightily to this destructive system? None other than the president of the American Federation of Teachers from 1998 to today, Democrat Randi Weingarten, a woman former Secretary of State Mick Pompeo says “is a danger to our children.”

That’s right, Weingarten represents the teachers who have mal-educated generations of Black students, supports the preposterous construct of Social Promotion–– promoting a child to the next grade regardless of skill mastery in the belief that it will promote self-esteem––all while she engages in anti-parent screeds and is lionized at the Biden White House!

The public schools run by Democrat-controlled unions and benefits-infatuated teachers have only vile insults at the mention of Eva Moskowitz, the woman who founded the first Charter School–– Success Academy––in New York City––there are now dozens, with Black parents clamoring to enroll their children. These schools educate children largely from black ghettos, who pass the Regents with flying colors on MERIT, score high marks on the SATs on MERIT, graduate from high school and go on to top-flight colleges on MERIT, and then go on to lives of independence and success.

…AND EVEN WORSE

Then there was the Democrat idea of Affirmative Action, the policy of favoring individuals for college admissions who belong to groups regarded as disadvantaged or subject to discrimination. Of course, it was a crashing failure. In essence, it said to Blacks: Look, you’re not that smart or motivated or accomplished, but you can still succeed if you don’t have to pass these whitey tests to get into college.

Did the proponents of this plan think so little of the native intelligence of Blacks that they wouldn’t see through the tremendous patronization and insult it inflicted? Did the program itself fail to see that Blacks who “graduated” from inferior high schools would not only be unable to keep up with the academic burden, but would be further wounded by their failure to do so?

So, they tried another strategy, the truly horrific, nonsensical and basically illiterate-supporting Common Core curricula inflicted on students by the Obama regime. Yet another crashing failure by the liberals, leftists, progressives among us––unless you think that credit should be given for students who can explain how they arrived at 2 + 2 = 5!

THE LAST LAYER OF THE EMOTIONAL ONION

Underneath the paralyzing layer of fear, below the obsessive nature of jealousy, under the blind rage and anger, there is the devastating emotion of despair. Of feeling that it’s all too much, too impossible, too overwhelming. This is the stuff of clinical depression. This is the stuff of suicide.

After all, fear and jealousy and anger are mobilizing! What can I do? Which protest group can I join? Who can I wreak my revenge on?

But despair has no allies. It is lonely. It is scary. It is immobilizing.

It is also what Ye and Kyrie and the legion of anti-Semites are most afraid of, with good reason, as suicides among Blacks have recently escalated dramatically.

THE SOLUTION

Don’t despair! The absolute cure for Black rage, jealousy, anger, and despair lies in one simple word: Emulate!

Spend one month of your entire life living with an observant Jewish family, reading the Bible, learning of the extreme emphasis Jews place on family unity, education, philanthropy, and mitzvahs––good deeds that can range from a simple smile to building a cancer research center to rushing all over the world to help in disaster areas.

Study why Jews, because of vicious discrimination, were forced literally to create Hollywood, why they were forced to build some of the best medical and research centers in America because they were barred from internships and residencies, the list of survival strategies is long and impressive.

Stop your jealousy. Stop your rage. Stop listening to the screeching racist preachers and politicians who have told you that you were a victim starting in your mother’s womb!

Start joining us Jews in fighting the real enemy, the actual powerful forces that have kept you down, defeated, and depressed: Liberals, Leftists, and Progressive Democrats and a horrific public education system.

Or, alternatively, stay in your perpetual rageful victim mode and see how far you’ve progressed in the next five or 10 or 1,000 years!

©Joan Swirsky. All rights reserved.

The Hidden Spiritual Humanism in James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ thumbnail

The Hidden Spiritual Humanism in James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’

By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

The popular sci fi film is more than a spectacular display of technology and artistry.


Avatar’, released in 2009, is the highest-grossing film in history. The sequel, ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’, will be released later this month. A third and fourth sequels are in production. Rudolph Lambert Fernandez takes a look at the values underlying the first film.


Avatar (2009) opens to a pitch-black screen. Before visuals, a voiceover.

You wonder. Is there life before life? Will there be life after death? As one life ends, does another begin? If you hear before you see, can you see beyond what you see too?

Many misread Avatar as another apocalyptic sci-fi flick, no more than an episode in James Cameron’s filmography that they can conveniently label techno-utopianism or environmentalism or both. Yet, for all his fascination with Nature and tech, Avatar is intensely spiritual: Store up wise treasures, let go of the rest. Life’s about second chances, giving them, taking them. To find yourself, lose yourself. Truth isn’t seeing, it’s seeing right. The stone that the builders reject may become the cornerstone.

After you’ve gone past plot and charactersAvatar stands majestic before you, a mountain of meaning.

Those complaining that Cameron places Nature above God (God as part of, not apart from Nature), or God on par with (rather than above) Nature, miss the point. And it’s this. Cameron keeps looking for and finding God (infinite goodness?) in man, in nature rather than in maglev trains, cryo-capsules, ampsuits and scorpion gunships.

Cameron’s positioning of humanity in the scheme of things is unmistakable. His humans remain superior to tech, shaping it, re-shaping it, demanding of it, bending it to their will, even when it threatens to overwhelm. At their best they’re part of Nature, complementing, not competing.

As far as Cameron’s concerned, for all Nature’s might, humans are unique in their capacity to protect, preserve, plunder or pollute Nature, on an oceanic scale. Ultimately, it’s enlightened humans who’ll convince the less enlightened and rally them against those who refuse to be enlightened. It’s enlightened humans who’ll place tech and Nature in proper order.

It isn’t just his mind, but his morality that sets man apart. He may be catastrophic when picking evil, but he’s salvific, on planetary scale, when choosing good.

Cameron’s no theologian or spiritual guide. He’s an entertainer with an eye on box-office spectacle. That he keeps dwelling on a super-natural power bigger than us, beyond us, and somehow inside us, should please both theologians and spiritual guides. No, Nature isn’t the final frontier. His Eywa “doesn’t take sides”, but his better humans always do, defending the defenceless, protecting the powerless.

Neytiri coaches Jake, “When you hear nothing, you will hear everything. When you see nothing, you will see everything.” She means nothing else! If you sense without distraction, you perceive more.

Jake rambles, “I started having these dreams of flying…sooner or later though, you always have to wake up.”

Cameron’s teasing. He’s conjuring a dream, a line-up of Avatar movies, from which you wish you didn’t have to wake. If all you dream of is flying up into the sky (Avatar, 2009) or diving down into the ocean (Avatar, The Way of Water, 2022), why not dream forever?

Cameron masterfully mixes it. You don’t know where dream ends and when reality begins.

As Pandora’s Na’vi become more real to him than earth’s humans, Jake sighs into his video-log, “Everything is backwards…out there is the true world, and in here is the dream…I can barely remember my old life, I’m not sure who I am anymore.”

Funnily, that’s just before he finds his calling as saviour, the new Toruk Macto, unifying the clans in a “time of great sorrow” as the first one did.

Many are called, but few are chosen

Cameron’s clear. Being biologically human isn’t enough.

Jake’s a reject, a paraplegic with little use in a battlefield, even less in a biolab. He betrays the Na’vi for his thirty pieces of silver, a bargain to get his legs back. Still wretched, he becomes the chosen one, a new Adam in a new Eden, a new David who’ll unite the tribes more profoundly than the old David did. It’s why Mo’at gives Jake a second chance. He’s a very human saviour, falling, then rising, by accepting responsibility, not passing the buck.

Rarely are second chances given their real name: forgiveness. Jake’s admission, of crime against the Na’vi, has a real name too: confession, a pathway to grace. Not because grace suddenly floods him, but because he’s now more open to its wetness — healing.

When Selfridge whines, “relations with the indigenous are only getting worse”, biologist Dr Grace snaps, “that tends to happen when you use machine guns on them!” Both know that the deliciously-titled precious mineral, unobtainium, is why anyone bothers with Pandora at all. Selfridge’s shareholders will tolerate bad press. They won’t stand for “a bad quarterly statement.”

They’re hoarding the wrong kind of treasure.

Like any self-respecting prophet, James Cameron delights in symbols.

Language can be a bridge connecting hearts and minds. Or a dam. “Hasta la vista, baby” is a bridge in Terminator. Here there are dams: human invaders call Na’vi “savages”, fearful Na’vi call invaders “demons”. But there are bridges too: humans learning Na’vi, Na’vi learning English.

Yet, for all his sweat over developing Pandora’s language, Cameron’s most profound moments are silent. A flowery Atokirina (seed of The Great Tree) silently stays Neytiri’s arrow aimed at bumbling intruder Jake. Wordless breath, shahalyu, a spiritual heartbeat, binds Na’vi with their creature-rides. Wordless blood reveals what skin hides; Mo’at pricks Jake with a thorn to divine his worth.

He who is last, shall be first

Cameron turns success (and failure) on its head.

Norm and Jake are a sort of Cain and Abel, or opposing sons to prodigal mother, Grace. Norm grumbles that he’s trained years for the mission and speaks fluent Na’vi, but Jake just falls off the “turnip truck and all of a sudden he’s cultural ambassador!?”

When Neytiri impatiently extinguishes his torch, an irritated Jake notices the forest come alive; he sees better without a flame. The Na’vi rely on inner light, especially in dark times.

Mo’at warns, “It is hard to fill a cup that is already full”, but compels Neytiri to coach the addled Jake; maybe his “insanity can be cured”. Not the insanity of not learning, but of not learning right.

Why’s the giant Hometree seemingly omnipresent?

You run a great distance, you’re still below its shade. You climb a great height; it still towers above you. To Na’vi, all energy is borrowed. One day you have to give it back. This network thrives on “flow”, the way of water. These connections tie person to person, in oneness. When jungle beasts hurt each other, Nature’s in harmony, when humans hurt each other, it’s out of tune.

Grace pretends to “like plants better than people” but, in fact, empathizes better than most.

You love Nature, but can’t stand people? Something’s off.

What are avatars? Superficially? They’re remote-controlled bodies you can take “for a spin” the way you’d test-ride a loaded Lamborghini. But as he mounts his sky-beast ikran for the first time, Jake’s clinging-conquering yell, “you’re mine!”, later turns to respect for his ride.

Avatars aren’t after-lives. They’re second chances here and now, offering futures, worlds, possibilities, Pandoras. Jake’s standing in for his dead twin brother, Tommy, just as Neytiri’s standing in for her dead sister, Silwanin.

We too can die to our old self every night that we sleep and come alive to a new self every morning that we wake, shed destructive ways, embrace life-giving habits. If, in our lifetimes, our bodies are mere avatar-suits, should their colours matter so much? Should our distinct dialects matter more than the fact that we can speak and be understood?

Norm exults in his avatar-suit’s hyper-muscularity, “I am a living god”. Back in her human body, Grace snaps, “Damn! Same old sack o’ bones.” That’s Cameron, thrilled — and terrified — by tech’s seductive “temptations in the desert” of human frailty. That’s tech’s fruity, but slithery, promise in Eden to make us superhuman “like God”, free of time-space limits that our bodies impose on us.

At a moral level, don’t saints and sages seem like nine-foot giants to us, free of the constraints of our paraplegic “suits”, our handicaps, our addictions, our cravings? Sure, but they got that way not by bench-pressing but by strengthening moral muscle.

Avatar may wear the sciences on its sleeve but it breathes the humanities. The avatar program’s compulsive documentation (of experiments and experiences) speaks of motivation beyond science, pure or applied. It’s less about the life “enhancing” potential of computers or machines, more about the bioethics of wielding that knowledge, those tools.

Losing his nature as mercenary “soldier”, Jake ends up finding his nature as “saviour” through painful learning and unlearning.

Some of Cameron’s most perceptive, courageous characters are women. Here, Mo’at (or Tsahik) interprets the will of The Great Mother Eywa. Neytiri suspects that there’s a saviour lurking behind two-timing Jake. Trudy won’t cross her red line when ordered to attack defenceless Na’vi. Grace high-fives good-hearted men, instead of shunning all men because they’re men.

Pandora’s ideal of love begins and ends with respect. It’s not enough that a man chooses a woman, she must choose him too. Jake desires Neytiri but refuses to possess her merely because he can. Once shahalyu is formed with a hunter, even an ikran flies with only that hunter. Na’vi too become (and stay) mates for life.

In treasured relationships, it’s not enough if “I see you”. I must see no one but you.

In betraying Pandora, Grace is as complicit as Jake is. She’s blinded by a zeal for science as he is by a lust for thrill.Cameron’s image of them tied by enraged Na’vi shows the brief, if cinematically inadequate, price they pay before Mo’at frees them, giving them a chance to atone.

No doubt some sculpt a religion out of ecology even at the expense of man, salivating at tech’s advance, hoping it’ll help man extinguish himself and leave Nature in peace. That’s nihilism, cleverly dressed as altruism. Since they can’t find meaning in flawed existence, they prefer destruction; the quicker the better.

Cameron’s humanism is refreshingly defiant, bursting with hope.

Remember The Abyss (1989)?

At the bottom (of the bottom) of the ocean, underwater drilling-rig foreman Bud finds otherwise peaceable aliens, brewing mountainous surface waves that threaten earth but freeze tantalizingly short of its shores. Their tech can manipulate water, but in galactic proportions. Relieved that earth’s been spared, Bud messages earth’s surface, “They’ve left us alone, but it bothers them to see us hurting each other. They want us to grow up a bit and put away childish things.”

Short of quoting Corinthians, Cameron’s saying that if we value each other, we’ll value the environment without being bullied into caring. The truest sign of caring is that you care for humans. Get that right and you’ll know exactly how to treat beings or objects, no matter how magnificent. He echoes that in Aliens, Terminator I, Terminator II, Titanic.

Of course, tech might one day prolong life, even revive it, but Cameron’s bothered with how we live. If anything he holds up the prospect of destruction (even self-destruction) as incentive to care more, not less. He’s saying that the choices we make while living and dying decide whether we deserve life at all, let alone life after death.

For all his worldliness, Cameron may be more of a spiritual humanist than the pretenders.

AUTHOR

Rudolph Lambert Fernandez

Rudolph Lambert Fernandez is an independent writer, writing on pop culture. Some of his writing on Hollywood movies, movie icons, women in film, feminism in film, women directors, Hollywood’s #MeToo has… More by Rudolph Lambert Fernandez

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Elite Chicago Private School Official Brags About LGBTQ+ Health Center Teaching ‘Queer Sex’ to Minors thumbnail

Elite Chicago Private School Official Brags About LGBTQ+ Health Center Teaching ‘Queer Sex’ to Minors

By Project Veritas

*CLICK HERE TO TWEET THE VIDEO*


Project Veritas released a new video today exposing a high-ranking private school official, Joseph Bruno, who admitted that he teaches underage children about sex with items such as “butt-plugs” and “dildos.” Bruno, who works as the Dean of Students at an elite school in Chicago called Francis W. Parker, said that these were the items brought into the classroom by an LGBTQ+ group.

Here is some of what is revealed in today’s video:

  • Joseph Bruno, Dean of Students, Francis W. Parker School: “So, I’ve been the Dean for four years. During Pride — we do a Pride Week every year — I had our LGBTQ+ Health Center come in [to the classroom]. They were passing around butt-plugs and dildos to my students — talking about queer sex, using lube versus using spit.”
  • Bruno: “They’re just, like, passing around dildos and butt-plugs. The kids are just playing with ‘em, looking at ‘em…They’re like, ‘How does this butt-plug work? How do we do – like, how does this work?’ That’s a really cool part of my job.”
  • Bruno: “We had a Drag Queen come in — pass out cookies and brownies and do photos.”

You can watch the full video HERE.

Project Veritas encourages students and parents to reach out to VeritasTips@protonmail.com with any information regarding teacher malfeasance in the classroom.

We will expose all the corrupt school officials and administrators one by one!


*CLICK HERE TO TWEET THE VIDEO*


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Huge Wave of Liberal Men are Getting Vasectomies to Protest Overturning Roe – https://t.co/uruRCknYho https://t.co/1Fsa9bttWG

— Bo Snerdley (@BoSnerdley) December 7, 2022

EDITORS NOTE: This Project Veritas video expose is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

New York Attorney General Who Sued Trump Covered Up Muslim Chief of Staff’s Sex Harassment thumbnail

New York Attorney General Who Sued Trump Covered Up Muslim Chief of Staff’s Sex Harassment

By Jihad Watch

This is what a culture of corruption looks like.

The Point recently discussed the story of sexual harassment in Attorney General Letitia James’ office.

Attorney General Letitia James’ chief of staff has resigned after being slapped with multiple sexual harassment complaints, which were filed before Election Day and kept quiet as James cruised to victory, sources told The Post.

Two women filed sexual harassment complaints against Ibrahim Khan – and one of those women was told her claims of inappropriate touching and unwanted kissing were substantiated, according to The New York Times.

James’ office appears to have violated the law in trying to keep the story buried.

The attorney general’s office says that when allegations first surfaced against Khan, they opted to hire an outside law firm on Oct. 4 to conduct an investigation. That firm, Littler Mendelson, substantiated at least one of those claims.

By law, outside contracts of more than $50,000 must go to the New York State Comptroller’s office for approval.

Jennifer Freeman, a spokesperson for State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, said on Friday night that “There is no contract before us for approval.”

In an email response to NY1, Delaney Kempner, a spokesperson for the attorney general admitted that the contract had not gone to the comptroller’s office, saying, “Due to the time it takes for financial terms to be appropriately reviewed and approved, it is not unusual for Office of Attorney General to engage a firm for time sensitive matters with an engagement letter while financial terms are being reviewed.”

When asked if Khan had undergone mandatory sexual harassment training, as required by law for state employees, the attorney general’s office refused to say, or provide, any documentation showing he had.

Ibrahim Khan, a former Muslim Students Association president, had led James’ campaign and served as her chief of staff. He was a close ally and James appears to have tried to handle it covertly. All the while James waged a ruthless campaign against conservatives, illegally targeting the NRA and Trump.

This is what a culture of corruption looks like.

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Troubling Trends: Is the Christian Era coming to a Close? thumbnail

Troubling Trends: Is the Christian Era coming to a Close?

By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Secularisation is decimating the world’s largest faith group.


We live in precarious times. The world is changing in ways we could not fathom a short forty years ago. Believing Christians, pro-family advocates and patriotic folks are fast becoming today’s marginalised communities.

For centuries the West, aka “Western Christendom”, was a dynamic and expanding enterprise that by the late 1800s effectively ruled the world. Even when warring among themselves, Westerners did their utmost to spread the faith. The world has been tremendously enriched by missions, schools, clinics and much else founded in the spirit of Christianity.

Today that is a flagging spirit, something painfully obvious. Two recent batches of demographic data seem to bear that out.

Replacement

The first came from the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS), reporting that only 42.6% of people in England and Wales identify as Christian. The UK Telegraph headline summed it up:

Christians now a minority in England and Wales for first time”

ONS reports that in 2001, 72% of people in England and Wales identified as Christian. Those identifying as “no religion” increased from 15% in 2001 to 37.2% in 2021. In the last decade self-identified Muslims rose by almost a third to 6.5%. For the same period, Hindus realised a 13% increase, rising to 1.7%.

Interestingly, self-identified Muslims are more religious than Christians. More people attend mosque every week in the UK than attend church. It has been that way for a while. According to a Christian Research study from twenty years ago:

51 per cent of the Muslims quizzed in the 2001 census said they prayed every day, compared to just 6.3 per cent of Christians who attend church services each week.

A 2005 Christian Research study, “The Future of the Church”, predicted that the  number of Muslims attending mosque every week would double that of Christians attending church by 2040, forecasting:

[T]he number of Christians attending Sunday service could see a two-thirds drop over the next three decades. The current 9.4 per cent of the population currently in regular attendance at Sunday service is expected to be under 5 per cent by 2040.

The UK is well on the way to meeting that forecast.

Secularisation

The second batch of troublesome data is the Pew Research Center’s study, “Modeling the Future of Religion in America”. Their findings are that Americans are leaving Christianity   in droves and identifying as “atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular.’”

[I]n 2020, about 64% of Americans, including children, were Christian. People who are religiously unaffiliated, sometimes called religious “nones,” accounted for 30% of the U.S. population. Adherents of all other religions — including Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists — totaled about 6%.

[P]rojections show Christians of all ages shrinking from 64% to between a little more than half (54%) and just above one-third (35%) of all Americans by 2070. Over that same period, “nones” would rise from the current 30% to somewhere between 34% and 52% of the U.S. population.

Similar figures are cited in British sociologist Stephen Bullivant’s just published book Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America (Oxford University Press).

The same trend is found throughout the Anglosphere, Europe and even Latin America. Is the Christian Era coming to a close?

Consider: For the sake of “religious neutrality,” the Christian calendar devised 1500 years ago by Dionysius Exiguus, denominating history per the Incarnation, used B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini) for dating history. That practice has been abandoned for BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era). While doing so may well be more “inclusive”, it nonetheless attests to the diminishing influence of Christianity. This is just one of modernity’s thousand cuts.

While religious transition is usually a lengthy process — consider the Great Schism, the Renaissance and Reformation — the twentieth century vastly accelerated secularisation of the West. Depleted and demoralised by two world wars, quickly followed by unprecedented affluence and lightning technological progress, the West saw mammon thoroughly triumph by the 1960s, when religious expression was banned from the public square in America.

Sobering consequences

With secularism comes moral relativism, where there are no absolutes. Rather, all is relative, situational and governed by feeling rather than thinking. In fact, those steadfastly standing by absolutes are often the object of chattering class derision. Despite the proliferation of “Pride” festivals throughout the West, today any public declaration of pride in being Christian, Western or White can be a career-terminator.

Along with mammon-worshiping secularism, there has been, worldwide, a 50% decline in fertility in 50 years. This is most acute in the Global North countries and is leading to unsustainable economic and social conditions. Little wonder that governments in the West and elsewhere are doing backflips to boost birthrates. Nothing like the Biblical injunction “be fruitful and multiply” is to be found in globalism, mammon-worship or whatever label that comports with modernism/secularism.

In fact, the fanatical zeal of acolytes of the secular religion, aka “wokeism”, is comparable to that of the early Bolshevik regime. Just note the ostracising, cancelling and complete intolerance of those with whom they disagree. And these folks are in power in most of the West. If you have any doubt, remember your history: as a friend recently reminded me, statues are pulled down and place names are changed after revolutions.

It is long past time that people of faith, the family-friendly and the patriotic types trying to preserve their respective historical nations cease quibbling among themselves and circle the wagons. Yes, the best defence is offence, but we need to consolidate our position first. That is called building community.

Remember that appeasement doesn’t work. Virtue signalling and sacrificing kindred spirits to persuade your enemies that you’re not racist, bigoted, homophobic, etc., are just bending the knee to the bad guys. They validate the regime. That doesn’t build community and solidarity. As the folks say down home, don’t feed the alligator, hoping to be eaten last.

AUTHOR

Louis T. March

Louis T. March has a background in government, business and philanthropy. A former talk show host, author and public speaker, he is a dedicated student of history and genealogy. Louis lives with his family… More by Louis T. March

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Secretary of State Blinken to Address Anti-Israel Group Along With ‘Infected With Jew-Hatred’ Activist thumbnail

Secretary of State Blinken to Address Anti-Israel Group Along With ‘Infected With Jew-Hatred’ Activist

By The Geller Report

The Biden administration really hates Israel.


One would think this would be a problem. But it’s also routine in the Biden administration which, in recent weeks, elevated Hady Amr, a terrorism supporter, to a top-tier emissary to the PLO and sent the FBI after Israel. This is just one in a series of ugly hate messages, the latest being to dispatch Secretary of State Blinken to address an anti-Israel group set up by George Soros and some Hong Kong money laundering.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will be the keynote speaker at leftwing J Street’s annual conference in Washington, D.C., the organization announced on Wednesday.

Blinken on Wednesday announced that he will serve as the headline speaker at the annual conference for J Street, which as recently as last month trashed Netanyahu, accusing the incoming prime minister of “building and bulldozing [his] way to permanent, undemocratic control of the West Bank.” The group also advocates conditioning U.S. aid to Israel, routinely attacks the Jewish state for defending itself against Palestinian terrorism…

The conference kicks off this weekend, with Blinken set to address the confab on Sunday, alongside former Bernie Sanders adviser and longtime Israel critic Matt Duss, Daily Beast writer Wajahat Ali, a cadre of pro-Palestinian activists, and several Democratic members of Congress, including Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.) and senator-elect Peter Welch (D., Vt.).

Duss, a Sanders ally, has gone well beyond being a critic.

Duss, whose writings have been described by a watchdog group, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, as “infected with Jew-hatred,” has been a leading voice in the anti-Israel movement for the better part of the last decade. His criticisms of Israel were too much even for the Obama White House, which said it was “troubled” by blog posts penned by Duss and his colleagues at the now-defunct ThinkProgress.

The Sanders ally gained notoriety in 2011 when he and several other writers at the Center for American Progress’s now-defunct ThinkProgress leveled charges of dual loyalty against Israel’s American supporters, calling them “Israel firsters,” a term that was widely condemned at the time as anti-Semitic.

In one 2010 posting on Israel’s deadly confrontation with a violent mob seeking to break its naval blockade of the Gaza Strip, Duss claimed the country’s policies are like “segregation in the American South” and a “moral abomination.” Duss is also a defender of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and said in 2019 that congressional efforts to counter the anti-Israel crowd are a “con and Democrats need to stop playing along.”

Also there is Daniel Seidemann who had tweeted, “Israel’s policies have become so aggressive and unapologetic – defiant even – that even our staunchest supporters, if they have any intellectual and moral integrity – are compelled to acknowledge the systematic manifestations of apartheid in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

The anti-Israel program also includes panels such as, “Resisting Occupation: Non-Violent Activism on the Ground”, and “Demolitions, Evictions, and Displacement in East Jerusalem and the West Bank”.

A helpful reminder that the Biden administration is and always will be an anti-Israel operation.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Congress-created ‘health’ group pushes gender-switching ‘trauma care’ for kids thumbnail

Congress-created ‘health’ group pushes gender-switching ‘trauma care’ for kids

By Judicial Watch

The state has no place in the raising of children, except in cases of child abuse when a child might become a ward of the state. But the American government has found its way into your home to assist you in raising your child.

The National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) came out in support of attempts to switch children’s genders in a statement titled “Gender-Affirming Care is Trauma-Informed Care.” The organization “was created by Congress in 2000 as part of the Children’s Health Act to raise the standard of care and increase access to services for children and families who experience or witness traumatic events.

Less than two months ago, U.S. President Joe Biden claimed that American states had “no right to restrict treatments like hormone blockers or sex change operations for transgender children.” He called any denial of such treatments “outrageous” and “immoral.” Texas Governor Greg Abbott, on the other hand, signed an order that designated giving children hormone therapy to be child abuse. Biden takes it for granted that a child is capable of determining his or her gender identity, a decision that will affect a child throughout his or her entire life. Such a presumption also strips parents of their rights to raise their children. There is a reason why children need adult care and supervision.

If you are of a Judeo-Christian background and adheres to the Genesis verse about “male and female He created them,” your religious rights are also being encroached upon. It is wrong for the state to meddle in the business of families by using the publicly-funded public school system to teach underage children that they can “choose” their gender. Youngsters are ill-equipped to make sound choices for their longterm best interests, even under the best of circumstances.

Since the NCTSN asserts that “gender affirming care is trauma-informed care,” the message is that if parents oppose “gender-affirming” care, the state can deem them to be subjecting their child to “trauma.” Under this model of “healthcare,” there is no consideration of the power of peer pressure among youth, nor of the natural emotional instability of youth as they transition into adulthood. Congress is tightening its grip upon families, trampling the rights of parents, and rejecting a child’s natural need for sound direction and stability. Given the religion of wokeism, an entire generation is at risk.

Children are being used in a dangerous experiment as pharmaceutical companies sell puberty blockers and psychoactive drugs, and trans clinics sprout up everywhere. In Canada, if all doesn’t go as planned,  when you’re 18 or older, you can qualify for help to kill yourself. An egregious Canadian law has been “sanitized” as a “service” called MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying); the law no longer requires “a person’s natural death to be reasonably foreseeable.” Among criteria to qualify for MAID: the patient must “have enduring and intolerable physical or psychological suffering that cannot be alleviated under conditions the person considers acceptable.” Proponents of the spreading euthanasia death cult put a pretty face on death, convincing victims that they are doing it to help them. A recent ad campaign showed “loved ones waving bubble wands next to the ocean, having picnics in the forest with friends and watching a puppet show.” Although the U.S. is not there yet, doctor-assisted suicide is still legal with conditions in ten US states and the District of Columbia, and given woke trends, it likely will not be long before America catches up to Canada. Now there is debate in Canada about offering MAID to underage kids, even babies if they are suffering from a “defect.” The message: just put them (and their parents) out of their misery.

It’s no secret that there is more psychological pain in the transgender community. These kids need rescuing from the woke system.

Data indicate that 82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide, with suicidality highest among transgender youth.

What society and mainline churches (which are far too quiet on the issue) did not realize early enough is that there is no limit whatsoever to woke madness, or to the lust for money and power at any expense, including the sacrifice of a nation’s children. The proponents of this madness have no respect for the intrinsic value of human life.

Watch this powerful video from a detransitioner:

Detransitioner who was approved for cross-sex hormones after just 2 counseling sessions blasts doctors for transitioning minors.

“My issue with this is that they’re allowing these things to happen to children… They can’t make these decisions, they’re children!” pic.twitter.com/0B6SoTNyaF

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 28, 2022

Given the natural turbulence of youth, brought on by hormones and an innate process of natural separation from parents as they embark on adulthood, it is dangerous to allow transgender indoctrination in schools. The NCTSN document instructs:

Believe and validate youth when they share their gender identities with you by always using and validating the names, pronouns, and identities that youth share with you, even if those change while they are exploring their identities. Many children are aware of their own gender identity as early as 3-5 years old.

Vulnerable kids are in the grip of a range of “experts,” many of whom (including Dr. Rachel Levine) are deeply troubled themselves and are too quick to attribute the cause of a youngster’s difficulties to gender dysphoria. Kids are being taught that their gender is fluid, and they can be whatever gender they want to be, including more than one (“they”). This is a recipe for emotional and physical trauma, both short term and long term. Children who are susceptible to this indoctrination find other kids who are likewise susceptible, and they encourage one another. These children are indoctrinated and backed by the powerful trans lobby and the state. What better way to make a child feel empowered? But it’s only temporary. The manipulative adults behind all this gloss over the fact that youngsters are ruled by short-term emotions. Indoctrinated trans kids are inevitably cut off from communication with nature’s support system: their parents who love them and are invested in them. Parents are deemed to be abusive adversaries of their own children if they attempt to intervene. These kids are little match for adult, seasoned woke propagandists in the media and the state apparatus.

AUTHOR

CHRISTINE DOUGLASS-WILLIAMS

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

If You Really Wanted to Destroy the United States… thumbnail

If You Really Wanted to Destroy the United States…

By The Geller Report

Save this column. It should be the script for every elected official who actually wants to save the Republic.

It would be hard to imagine any planned agenda to destroy America that would have been as injurious as what we already suffered the last two years.

By Victor Davis Hanson. November 30, 2022

First, you would surrender our prior energy independence.

Reduce new gas and oil leases on federal lands to the lowest levels of any president in history. Cut back production at precisely the time the world is emerging from a two-year lockdown with pent-up consumer demand.

Make war on coal and nuclear power. Drain the strategic petroleum reserve to make the pain for consumers more bearable for midterm election advantage.

Cancel the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil and gas field. Block pipelines like the Keystone oil pipeline and the Constitution natural gas line.

Overregulate and demonize frackers and horizontal drillers. Ensure there is less investment for their exploration and production.

Make use of internal combustion engines or fossil fuel power generation prohibitively expensive. Achieve a green oil-dependency along the lines of contemporary Europe.

Second, print trillions of dollars in new currency as the lockdowns end, demand rises, and consumers are already saturated with COVID-19 subsidies. Keep interest rates low, well below the rate of inflation, as you print more money. Ensure that passbook holders earn no interest at the very time prices skyrocket to the highest per annum level in 40 years.

“Spread the wealth” by sending money to those who already have enough, while making it less valuable for those deemed to have too much. Ensure runaway high prices to wean the middle class off its consumerism and supposedly to inspire them to buy less junk they don’t need. Damn the rich in the open and in the abstract, court them in the concrete and secret of darkness.

Third, end America’s physical boundaries. Render it an amorphous people and anywhere space. End any vestigial difference between a citizen and resident. Up the current nearly 50 million who were not born in the United States —27 percent of California’s population—to 100 million and more by allowing 3 million illegal aliens to enter per year.

Fourth, destroy the public trust in its elections. Render Election Day irrelevant. Make proper auditing of 110 million mail-in/early ballots impossible. Normalize ballot harvesting and curing.

Urge leftist billionaires to infuse their riches to “absorb” the work of state registrars in key precincts to ensure the correct “turn-out.”

Blast as “election denialists,” “insurrectionists,” and “democracy destroyers” anyone who objects to these radical ballot changes, neither passed by the U.S. Congress nor by state legislators. Weaponize the FBI, CIA, and Department of Justice.

Fifth, redefine crime as one rich man’s crime, another poor man’s necessity.

Let those who need “things” exercise their entitlement to them. Rewrite or ignore laws to exempt the oppressed who take, or do, what they want as atonement for past systemic racism and oppression.

Six, junk the ossified idea of a melting pot and multiracial society united by common American values and ideals. Instead, identify individuals by their superficial appearance. Seek to be a victim and monetize your claims against perceived victimizers. Call anyone a “racist” who resists.

Encourage each tribe, defined by common race, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation affinities, to band together to oppose the monolithic “white privilege” majority. Encourage social and tribal tensions. Racially discriminate to end discrimination.

Greenlight statue toppling, name changing, boycotting, cancel culturing, ostracizing, and Trotskyizing. Erase the past, control the present, and create a new American person for the future.

Seven, render the United States just one of many nations abroad. Abandon Afghanistan in shame. Leave behind thousands of loyal Afghan allies, billions of dollars in equipment, a billion-dollar embassy, and the largest air base in central Asia. Appease the theocracy to reenter the Iran nuclear deal.

Beg enemies like Venezuela, Russia, and Iran to pump more oil when it is politically expedient for us to have abundant supplies—oil that we have in abundance but won’t produce. Discourage friends like Guinea from producing more energy and cancel allies’ energy projects like the EastMed pipeline.

Trash but then beg Saudi Arabia to pump more oil right before the midterms for domestic political advantage.

Eight, neuter the First Amendment. Enlist Silicon Valley monopolies to silence unwanted free speech while using Big Tech’s mega profits to warp elections. Declare free expression “hate speech.” Criminalize contrarian social media.

Nine, demonize half the country as semi-fascists, un-Americans, insurrectionists, and even potential domestic terrorists. Try to change inconvenient ancient rules: seek to pack the court, end the filibuster, junk the Electoral College, and bring in two more states.

Twice impeach a president who tried to stand in your way. Try him when he is an emeritus president and private citizen. Raid his home. Seek to indict a future rival to the current president.

Ten, never mention the origins of the COVID virus. Never blame China for the release of SARS-CoV-2 virus. Exempt investigations of U.S. health officials who subsidized Chinese gain-of-function research. Ignore the Bill of Rights to mandate vaccinations, mask wearing, and quarantines.

We have done all of the above. It would be hard to imagine any planned agenda to destroy America that would have been as injurious as what we already suffered the last two years.

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. All rights reserved.

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From 8,000,000,000 to Zero

By The Catholic Thing

David Warren: The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement is a thing. Who’d have guessed progressive modernity would be humanity’s end? 


The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement is officially a thing, I learn from the usual reliable media sources. Its founder, Les Knight, advocates intelligent non-breeding.

While most World. Economic Forum and environmental crusaders only want the world’s population to be reduced by seven billion or so, Mr. Knight would like to eliminate the whole amount.

Like many other progressive people, he likes to flatter the young for their intelligence and wisdom. By coincidence, they are also our largest potential breeding group. Mr. Knight’s TV presentation (on Fox this week) goes like this:

“My plan is for everyone to think before they procreate, and if people really think about it, think it all the way through, and have the wherewithal not to procreate, which is a really big problem all over the planet. . .44 percent of young people are saying ‘no I don’t think I wanna do that.’”

“Just because they’ve thought about it.”

Now, I doubt that 44 percent of the young have come to this decision, formally, but they seem to be not breeding, and thus giving encouragement to the extinguishers.

Elsewhere in demographic trends: the world’s population is reported to have hit eight billion. If this is true, the counters predict nine, and perhaps ten, then an accelerating drop. For the world seems to favor extinction, and in the absence of sufficient babies, the live population is aging very fast. This is happening even in remote villages.

Grand United Nations plans for sustainable development, family planning, and decarbonization, are the largest international bureaucracies devoted to the goal of population elimination. But what if people resumed having babies? Would that not change everything?

While men can have babies, according to progressive belief, I wonder if they will when their average age passes seventy. Whether women, once they have attained this average age, will also be getting pregnant, I have no opinion. I have learned not to comment on the female body.

For the next generation or so, the population will rise from cumulative habit, but then it will begin crashing – almost everywhere.

Through the decades that I have been following the numbers (as a journalist, not a scientist), I have noticed that the more authoritative ones go consistently over the top, exaggerating the speed of population growth. They are also inclined to overestimate the current population, thanks, I think, to political and ethnic pressures to drive the numbers, usually up.

Indonesia and Red China are, I would guess, two of the most guilty of this. The Chinese have quietly conceded that 100 million of their citizens don’t exist. The Indonesians have tried to reduce the proportion of Christians, Buddhists, and others, in the gentlest possible way, by creating millions of imaginary Muslims. Indeed, I am skeptical of the size of the Muslim population overall, and this makes me less alarmed about Islamization.

On the other hand, the population of Africa may be going up quicker, as the number-crunchers are beginning to admit. It is not that the Africans are more fecund, exactly, but that they instinctively form families. They have a greater resistance to modernity, and while the international population may soon stagnate, it will then grow in Africa as it shrinks everywhere.

The future of the human race may thus be “out of Africa,” just as it was (supposedly) in distant antiquity.

So this is, arguably, the best news for the survival of homo sapiens sapiens. Only we, the non-Africans, are likely to disappear, leaving the whole planet free for any African excess.

Elsewhere, the reasons for decline are not, over-simply, the declining need for children to support us in old age. This cliche has satisfied the curiosity of social scientists for too long. The reality is a complex of associations with increasing wealth, and technological improvements.

Common attitudes have become less and less religious, and people cease to be impressed by old-fashioned moral certainties. They have decided to afford not only material goods, but spiritual luxuries. Today, they can believe what they want, instead of having to limit themselves to the plausible.

With increasing per capita wealth (universally) comes increasing arrogance, pride, and smugness; spoilt children, narcissism, and so on: all the spiritual markers of modernity. This cannot be precisely measured, however – statistics are useless for intangibles, and so they aren’t even gathered.

The result can however be verified. Fewer children are proportionally hatched, and then fewer in each subsequent generation.

Not just the tiny flat Maldive Islands may disappear beneath the waves as a consequence of global warming. Vast Japan will become so many uninhabited mountains; though sufficiently tall to keep sticking out of the water.

Population decline is already advancing in other rich, over-developed nations. And where the population is still growing, in places like Canada, Germany, or the United States, it is because governments encourage immigrants to settle in numbers sufficient to pay the pensions of our retired. This is, in effect, the latest form of slavery.

Yet it makes perfect sense, in the longer term, because as the immigrant streams dry up, the pensioners will also have dessicated. Not since the dinosaurs have we had such a die-off.

Were it not for Ukraine, I might think we had already reached the point where we couldn’t have wars anymore. There are recruitment issues in all the world’s great armies. But Mr. Knight can be pleased that euthanasia, suicide, and drug deaths are flourishing, especially among young males, now that they are no longer needed as soldiers.

Extinction follows from minute, but aggregate, changes in perception. Previously, for the majority, the desire to live was even larger than the desire to conserve coal or diamonds. Surprisingly, we didn’t need reasons to persist. Typically, we tried to live as long as possible. God, too, was generally perceived to be alive, and “an influencer” in human life.

Who’d have guessed that progressive modernity would be our extinction event?

You may also enjoy some of our most popular columns from the last dozen years:

Howard Kainz’s How It all Ends: Muslim and Christian Versions

Francis J. Beckwith’s Do Muslims and Christians Worship the Same God?

AUTHOR

David Warren

David Warren is a former editor of the Idler magazine and columnist in Canadian newspapers. He has extensive experience in the Near and Far East. His blog, Essays in Idleness, is now to be found at: davidwarrenonline.com.

EDITORS NOTE: This The Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2022 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

Cancelling the ‘Most Wonderful Time of the Year’? thumbnail

Cancelling the ‘Most Wonderful Time of the Year’?

By Jerry Newcombe

If the left had its way, there would be no Christmas, no Easter, no Thanksgiving. If they had their way, anything related to Jesus would be cancelled.

In fact, a new memo has come out in King County in Washington State, the county of Seattle. Thus saith the King County Department of Human Resources: “Thou shalt not celebrate Christmas, but if you do, don’t let anyone know about it.” No, that’s just my paraphrase.

Actually they write: “Some employees may not share your religion, practice any religion, or share your enthusiasm for holiday decorations. Displays of religious symbols may only be displayed in an employee’s personal workspace. Religious symbols should not be displayed in or as a background to an employee’s virtual workspace.”

In an article about this for Focus on the Family, writer Jeff Johnston notes: “If you’re working from home, you better make sure people don’t catch a glimpse of Jesus, Joseph and Mary in the background.”

Talk host Jason Rantz adds: “You can celebrate LGBT Pride and wear a Black Lives Matter button throughout your day as a King County employee. But you better not show a nativity set or menorah on your digital workspace or your home office.”

Many years ago I co-wrote a book with Dr. D. James Kennedy about the social impact of Christianity, showing how our world has been blessed in so many positive ways because Jesus had come. The book is called, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born?

At D. James Kennedy Ministries (formerly Coral Ridge Ministries), we made a TV special about it in the early 2000’s and are now in the process of making an updated program dealing with the same thesis.

One of our guests in the first program was Dr. Janice Shaw Crouse, who worked for years with Concerned Women for America. Janice told our viewers: “When you see the atheist attack manger scenes, you would think, ‘This is an innocent, innocuous kind of thing. What do they have against a manger scene for crying out loud?’ It gives you some idea of how powerful Jesus Christ is. If He were not powerful, what would they care?”

And there it is. People aren’t afraid of Kwanzaa. They’re afraid of Jesus.

And why not? Jesus is more than just a man.

As John’s Gospel notes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

In his book, Miracles, C.S. Lewis, perhaps the greatest Christian writer in the 20th century, said: “The central miracle asserted by Christians is the incarnation. They say that God became man.”

He added, “If the thing happened, it was the central event in the history of the world.” His books show over and over that Lewis most assuredly believed that “the thing happened.”

One of his characters in his series of books for children, The Chronicles of Narnia, notes this: “In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”

But without Jesus, to paraphrase a friend, our world would just turn into “a winter wasteland.”

In a 1910 book on the impact of Jesus in the realm of literature, author Joseph Nelson Greene made an interesting observation.

He wrote, “There is a strange legend of a world that grew colorless in a single night…If to-night, with one sweep of the arm you brush from literature the Christ, the scenes and suggestions from His life, the spirit which He exhibited, the principles for which He stood, you would have a world made colorless in a night. It would be the world of letters, for Christ is the color thereof.”

One man who gratefully celebrated Christmas and opposed the Scrooges that perpetually try to shut it down was our 40th president, Ronald Reagan.

Reagan pointed out on December 24, 1983, “Some celebrate Christmas as the birthday of a great teacher and philosopher. But to other millions of us, Jesus is much more. He is divine, living assurance that God so loved the world He gave us His only begotten Son so that by believing in Him and learning to love each other we could one day be together in paradise.”

Perhaps the greatest fear of secularists, like those bureaucrats in King County, trying to turn Christmas into a black and white “winter wasteland” is the possibility that Jesus is real and that His birth was just the beginning of His Kingdom.

©Jerry Newcombe, D.Min. All rights reserved.

RELATED ARTICLE: University of Cambridge Dean: Jesus Could Have Been Transgender

Warnock’s Former Church Repeatedly Hosted Antisemite Leonard Jeffries thumbnail

Warnock’s Former Church Repeatedly Hosted Antisemite Leonard Jeffries

By Discover The Networks

Fox News reports that Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., worked as a youth and assistant pastor of a church for a decade while it repeatedly hosted former New York City professor Leonard Jeffries, who was ousted over antisemitic and black supremacist teachings.

From 1991 to 2001, Warnock served as youth pastor for six years and then assistant pastor for four years under Rev. Calvin O. Butts at Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City. From 1991 to 1998, Butts’ church hosted Jeffries as a speaker at least three times.

Leonard Jeffries is the uncle of far-Left election denier Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who is poised to succeed far-Left election denier Nancy Pelosi as the next Democrat leader in the House. The congressman said in 2013 that he remained close with his uncle but disagreed with his theories.

At the time of his first appearance at the Abyssinian church in 1991, Leonard Jeffries was embroiled in a legal battle to retain his position as the Black studies department chair at City University of New York (CUNY). He was ultimately removed from his position after a years-long dispute over racist and antisemitic remarks, including blaming Jewish people for the transatlantic slave trade and supporting Black supremacist ideals, like the theory that higher melanin levels make Black people inherently superior to White people.

Leonard spoke about the CUNY controversy during an October 1991 speech at Abyssinian Baptist Church after a student reporter with The Harvard Crimson alleged the professor had slammed the outlet as a “Jewish newspaper” during their interview, threatened the reporter’s life and had a bodyguard physically seize the audio recording of the interview, the New York Times reported at the time.

Leonard did not deny the reporter’s accusations.

Also in 1991, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) released a report on Leonard “and the Antisemitic Branch of the Afrocentrism Movement,” highlighting several of the now-former professor’s comments on white people and Jews.

The AJC report said Leonard “preaches Jew-hatred like a religion” and claimed he organized a 1990 conference for black teachers that featured black nationalist and antisemitic rhetoric and reading materials.

In July 1991, three months before his first Abyssinian speech, Leonard claimed the portrayal of black people in movies was “a conspiracy, planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood, where people called Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani and what not,” the AJC report said.

The report also noted Leonard’s racially-charged rhetoric “teaching that blacks are racially superior to whites” and his references to black people as “sun people” due to “more melanin in their skin than whites, whom he calls ‘ice people.’”

Jeffries appeared at the Abyssinian church again in February 1992, giving a speech about systemic racism and white-on-black crime after a white police officer was acquitted in the shooting death of black teenager Phillip Pannell. “Black people are under siege,” Jeffries was quoted as saying.

Abyssinian hosted Jeffries for a third time in July 1998, when he and his wife, Rosalind, performed the libation marking the passing of black historian John Hendrik Clarke.

In 2017, the left-leaning group the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), dubbed Jeffries an “anti-Semitic” speaker in a report covering antisemitism on college campuses.

“Leonard Jeffries, the former head of the Black Studies Department at the City College of CUNY, and a professor there since 1972, has espoused racist and anti-Semitic views and theories since at least the early 1980s, when his comments – made while he was department head – began to attract public attention,” the ADL wrote.

“In the spring of 1988, a white student wrote an account in the student newspaper of his experiences in Jeffries’ class, Black Studies 101,” the ADL continued. “The student recounted numerous times when Jeffries constructed large parts of his class around anti-white arguments.”

The ADL also noted the 1990 New York Times article that “reported that in an April 1990 class on African heritage, Jeffries said that ‘rich Jews who financed the development of Europe also financed the slave trade,’ and that ‘the Jewish Holocaust is raised as the only Holocaust.’”

Leonard Jeffries’ rhetoric about Jewish people continued after his Harvard appearance as well. In 1994, he was quoted by The New York Times as comparing Jewish white people to “skunks” who “stunk up everything.” Prior to a February 2012 keynote speech in Chicago from notorious antisemitic preacher Louis Farrakhan, Leonard was quoted as saying during a discussion panel, “The evil genius of the Jewish community was to put together their powers to make business their religion and make it part of their culture.”


Leonard Jeffries

4 Known Connections

Jeffries’ black supremacist views first came to public notice in the spring of 1988, when a white student, writing in the CCNY campus newspaper, catalogued the host of anti-white theories that Jeffries routinely advanced in one of his classes, Black Studies 101. Jeffries had been teaching at CCNY since 1972, when he was tapped to head the Black Studies department and was almost instantly granted tenure, thanks in no small part to a CCNY administration determined to appease a surging militancy among blacks on campus. Jeffries had little or no standard peer-reviewed scholarship to his name at the time he was granted tenure — or, for that matter, since.

In April 1990, the New York Times reported that another Jeffries class, nominally about African heritage, would have been truer to its content had it been offered under title of “Anti-Jewish Conspiracies 101.” Grossly overstating the participation of Jews in the transatlantic slave trade, Jeffries taught that “rich Jews who financed the development of Europe also financed the slave trade.” In a similar vein, he railed against the notion that the murder of six million Jews during World War II deserved to be recognized as a uniquely horrific act of genocide, complaining to his students that “the Jewish Holocaust is raised as the only Holocaust.”

To learn more about Leonard Jeffries, click here.

EDITORS NOTE: This Discover the Network column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Afghanistan: Taliban flogs people in soccer stadium for ‘adultery, robbery and gay sex’ thumbnail

Afghanistan: Taliban flogs people in soccer stadium for ‘adultery, robbery and gay sex’

By Jihad Watch

Sharia, we are constantly told in the West, is completely benign and compatible with Western secular values. Who has Sharia wrong? Non-Muslim Western secular analysts? Or the Taliban?

More on this story.

The Taliban Is Flogging People In Football Stadiums For ‘Adultery and Gay Sex

by Mohammed Rasool, Vice, November 24, 2022 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

The Taliban has brought back public floggings for what the group says are “moral crimes,” with people lashed in football stadiums after being convicted by the judges of the Islamist group.

A group of 14 people, including three women, were lashed in a football stadium in front of a crowd on Wednesday in the eastern Logar province. A Taliban official told the BBC that they were being punished for sins “including adultery, robbery, and gay sex.”

The group’s “Supreme Court” confirmed the conviction of “14 people, including three women, who were lashed, and attended by scholars, authorities, and people” in a statement on Twitter.

It’s believed to be the second round of lashings this month, after reports that 19 people were flogged in a similar way in the northern Takhar province.

The wave of public punishments comes a week after the Taliban announced that it will be “implementing Sharia Law” in full force across the country. Scenes such as the flogging resemble the group’s previous stint in power in the late 90s, which featured public executions, stoning, and other forms of corporal punishments….

The Islamist group’s version of the justice system is a mixed bag of Islamic laws and the centuries-old arbitration customs of Afghanistan. To justify banning girls from attending high school, the Islamists cited “cultural” values, as it disagrees with many Islamic scholars’ take on the issue….

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

RELATED ARTICLES:

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India: Muslim rapes Hindu girl at gunpoint while his sisters record the act, blackmails her to convert to Islam

Islamic Republic of Pakistan: 200 Christians left homeless after authorities bulldoze their homes without warning

London’s Sadiq Khan: ‘We desperately need new regulation of social media and online speech’

Palestinian Authority urges youth to seek ‘martyrdom-death,’ which it presents as a ‘wedding of martyrs’

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Politics – Lies, Deceptions and Misplaced Hopes thumbnail

Politics – Lies, Deceptions and Misplaced Hopes

By Bud Hancock

Is there a more divisive subject than politics? Is there a process that uses more lies and deception to accomplish its own purposes? It causes divides between friends, between family members and even between cities, states and nations. Politicians talk about unity and peace, working together for “the betterment of everyone”, all the while knowing that their actions will NOT accomplish what their words promise. The amazing thing is that voters have been falling for their political lies and eagerly accepting the deception they bring.

Politicians have been perfecting their cleverly worded promises and deceiving people with them for generations. Why do voters so easily accept their political promises as ‘truth’? Because, inherently, people want the truth, they need the truth, otherwise life is nothing more than a passing of time that leaves sadness, heartaches and a yearning for something that should have been but did not materialize. They live their lives guided by misplaced hope. But after living on the misplaced hopes all their lives, they wrongly come to the belief that there is no truth, nothing on which to place their hopes expecting those hopes to become reality.

One might assume that the registered voting populace of the United States would (and should) have a good understanding of politics in general and the US political system in particular, what it is and how it works but that assumption would be totally wrong. There has been, and continues to be, a lack of sound teaching about the reality of politics in the US and as a result, there are likely more ignorant voters here than anywhere else in the world. That sad lack of proper education on politics, whether in government controlled public schools or in churches in this country, is having a serious impact on the ability of the citizens to maintain contact with reality and avoid the dangers and pitfalls of politically-based deception of the masses.

There are still millions of legal citizens living in the US (I’m not counting the millions of ILLegals who vote ILLegally in our elections, OR the dead ones who continue to vote years after their burials) who seem to believe there is some degree of morality and ethics inherent in the US political system. Because of their misplaced belief, they live their lives in a misplaced hope, the hope that some politician will actually come along and Make America Great Again.

These same ignorant voters may as well believe that Santa Claus is a fat man in a red suit who squeezes his obese body down their chimneys on Christmas Eve to deliver gifts to all who ‘watch out’ and do not ‘pout or cry’. Believing that any ‘political system’ is a fair and credible process for electing candidates to public office is tantamount to the belief in Santa Claus and is not only childish and ignorant/stupid, but extremely dangerous.

Power and its Ability to Corrupt

It has been said that Power corrupts and Absolute Power corrupts absolutely.  But, how much difference is there between power and absolute power, or for that matter, between corruption and absolute corruption? As long as we humans live in flesh and blood bodies, there will be some corruption in each of us, but politics, by its very nature caters to and fosters in fallen human beings a serious greediness for more of what it is is intended to produce: POWER. Once power is gotten, it unleashes in the possessor, an appetite for more regardless of how the ‘more’ is gotten. That evil appetite is what leads to the corruption that, if fostered, can become absolute.

Janwillem van Wettering said: “Greed is a fat demon with a small mouth and whatever you feed it is never enough.” This ‘fat demon’ is the demonic force within the nature of fallen man that allows the evil inherent in politics to overtake and possess him. Power, when given to a person of low or questionable character, tends to cause that person to lose any sense of humility they might have possessed, and that lack of humility allows the void to be replaced by pride which then encourages the person to bypass or negate any need to credit God with his or her accomplishments and/or ‘political status’.

Pride’s Position in Politics

The original ‘politician’ and the Master of ALL politics, Satan/Lucifer/the Devil, is the perfect example of the characteristics exhibited by today’s politicians. The first and Master Politician is the one who invented politics as a means of promoting himself to a position of power over humanity.

Satan had some power and authority on the earth, in the time before the creation of Adam, in the ‘world that then was’ (Read 2 Peter 3 and Isaiah 14) and the throne he had on the earth at that time was initially given to him by God. But through his pride, greed and arrogance, Satan tried to exalt himself above the God who created him and thereby forfeited that throne and authority. His treason toward his creator caused the destruction of ‘the world that then was’ and caused the earth to sit dark and idle for an unknown period of time.

We are not told where Satan was during that unknown time period or what he ws doing, but when God recreated (actually ‘renewed’) the earth in the Genesis chapter one account, Satan almost immediately entered the picture in an attempt to regain a throne and authority on the earth, and through man’s treason, he was successful. His modus operandi in that situation? He spoke lies that were received as ‘truth’ and thus, though deceit, brought about the downfall of man.

In a masterful speech to the the ‘scribes and Pharisees’, the local politicians of His time, Jesus rebuked them for their refusal to accept the TRUTH, that Jesus was, and IS, the promised Messiah, the saviour of the world whose appearance was prophesied throughout the Old Testament. In John 8:44 KJV, He said, “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it”.

The reference Jesus made to the devil in that verse sounds a lot like a description of most politicians of today. There are tens of thousands of politicians in public offices in the United States, most of whom were ‘elected’ by their constituents, some in fair and legal elections and some due to election fraud. I would surmise that at least some of these people were of reasonably good morals and character when they decided to enter politics, but as they remain in that pursuit, they soon learn that if they don’t become reasonably adept at lying, they will not remain in their positions for long. While there was likely some truth spoken by both sides regarding the elections in 2020 and the recent one in 2022, any reasonable person must conclude that both were far from ‘ethical’ and presented a serious lack of ‘morality’. Anyone who has any spiritual discernment at all knows this to be true.

The American Political System: A Complete Failure

We American citizens are ‘privileged’ to live in a free country, at least a country that once was free, but unfortunately, too many people in the US believe that living in a ‘free country’ means that ‘everything is free’. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing is free; there is a cost associated with every benefit that can be had. The freedom we have in America was purchased at the cost of much bloodshed and sacrifice on the part of those who not only believed that a free society is the best society, but who also despised the whole idea of politics as a means of determining who would be best suited to conduct the business of running a ‘moral and ethical’ government.

How do I know they despised politics? Just read their declarations and rhetoric when they were determining what the new government would look like and how it would be administered. They had fled from a system in England that was ruled from the top down and left little for those at the bottom other than a life of empty promises and pseudo-slavery.

And though most of them were of the same mind, there were those who truly doubted that a free society could remain so for an extended time, e.g. Ben Franklin. Their idea of a free society was one that allowed each state within the ‘union of states’ to be free and sovereign and completely separated from an extremely limited federal government whose main role was to protect the borders of the nation and levy such taxes as might be needed to perform those limited functions.

However, it did not take very long for the fears of some of the Founders to become reality. A constitutional republic soon degenerated into a democracy, and most of the Founders knew that a democracy either implodes and disappears from the world scene or turns into a full-blown tyrannical state.

The Misplaced Hope

The human desire for power is anti-God and antichrist. But what fuels that desire and causes it to win control over any godly and Christlike characteristics? In many cases the fuel is the greed upon which the practice of politics is based. That satanic process provides the politician with monetary rewards, reinforces the control factor and stokes the natural human greediness. In addition to the monetary rewards, power is added to the mix making the politician feel as though he is something very important, even ‘special’, something the world needs and cannot live without. When all these ingredients are added together, the result is pride and the two evil twins, power and pride, can totally engulf a person’s being and turn him from a seemingly ‘good person’ into a complete monster.

There was a time when members of the US Congress were held accountable for their actions by their constituents. They knew, based on historical records that, when they were not doing their jobs as true representatives of the people, they would be called up short when their terms were up and they were vying for reelection. That ‘calling up short’ would send them back to their home states as private citizens. In a sense, they were true employees of the American people and their employment could be terminated by those same citizens.

Those days are now gone and the ‘representatives’ no longer consider themselves to be employees of the people. Their ‘measly’ $174,000 yearly salaries pale in comparison to the huge compensations, (in some cases totaling in the millions of dollars) they receive from their “true employers”, the globalist bankers who now control every government on earth, especially the current one in DC. Those massive amounts of “under the table”, dirty money are used at the discretion of politicians and their parties (all of them) to buy as many votes as are needed to determine the outcome of ANY election, thereby keeping them, both Democrats and Republicans, in office.

There are multiple calls from many people on the ‘conservative’ side of politics, when trying to get the conservative voice heard in Congress, urging us to “Contact your congressional representatives”  to encourage him or her to listen to your ideas and thoughts on certain legislation and ultimately to get them to change their minds.

But in reality, the voters do NOT ‘have the ear’ of a politician, rather these politicians no longer consider themselves to be ‘employees of the people, but are wholly owned by their globalist masters, the ones who provide the ‘rewards’ that shut their eyes and ears to any voices but those of their masters. So why should any sitting congressman/congresswoman or senator even consider listening to their constituents? That is NOT a rhetorical question and I WILL provide the answer: THEY DON’T.

According to God and His word, a human being is a “triune” being, meaning he/she IS a spirit, HAS a soul and LIVES in a body. The soul of a man consists of the mind, the will and the emotions and is the center of man’s conscience, the mechanism, guided by the spirit of a man, that differentiates between what is right and good, and what is wrong and evil; this faculty allows him to make right and proper decisions that affect his life. In politics, the value of the soul is often cast aside and sold to the highest bidder, Satan.

The term, “To sell one’s soul to the devil” is defined by The Free Dictionary as “To abandon one’s values or morals in return for some highly desired benefit, typically success, power, wealth, etc.” The historical reference of this idiom is: “to do or be willing to do anything, no matter how wrong, in order to achieve your objective.”  The reference here is to a contract supposedly made with the devil by certain people: in return for granting them all their desires in this life, the devil would receive their souls for all eternity.

Those who have actually made the decision to accept a reward from Satan in exchange for their souls have damned their souls to hell and are way beyond “changing their minds”. They have consciously given up any moral values they may have previously possessed in order to receive something they deem to be more valuable than their souls. In effect, they have seared their consciences and those who, according to the Bible, have ‘seared consciences’ (1 Timothy 4:2) are beyond making any decisions that will benefit anyone other than themselves.

Politicians with seared consciences, who have given up their moral values in order to receive their desired rewards from Satan, are not good candidates to waste words on, trying to get them to change their minds; their minds are already made up and they will continue on their evil paths until they die. When a group of elected representatives have a majority of members who are in the ‘seared conscience’ state, nothing can be expected of them but lies and deception. Because of their alignment with Satan and his evil ways, they have eternally separated themselves from God and truth so the truth cannot ever be expected to come from them.

Conclusion

Hope, when placed correctly, is a wonderful thing. It gives one a positive look into the future and expects the best possible outcome. Children are wonderful to watch when they have expressed their hopes to an authority with strong moral values, for something they fervently desire.

However, when hope is misplaced the result is not only disappointing, but for some it can be devastating. The Bible says in Hebrews 11:1, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen”. This scripture concerning ‘hope properly placed’ is saying that faith in the proper authority will bring about the things hoped for. But what about hope that is misplaced?

In politics, citizens are somewhat at the mercy of those in authority in government, those who so easily make promises to their constituents. If history could prove that the politicians who make promises always follow through and keep them, I would heartily endorse placing some level of hope for a better government in the actions of politicians.

But as the title of this article states, Politics is about Lies, Deceptions and Misplaced Hope. Anyone who still believes that politicians are intent on keeping their political promises is suffering from a bad case of “Misplaced Hope” (compare to delusion). One politician from the past stated the truth perfectly: “For those looking for security, be forewarned, there is nothing more insecure than a political promise” (Harry Browne, Libertarian Party candidate for POTUS, 1996 and 2000).

When you see political maneuvering, bloviating and what seems to be discord and arguments between the Democrats and Republicans in the US Congress, remember that we are only witnesses to what appears to be a war between them but Sun Tsu famously said that “all war is deception”. The maneuvering, arguments, discord and bloviating are merely deception and lies designed to distract us and keep us from seeing what is transpiring in the shadows where the true evil lives and functions.

I know this will be very difficult for many to hear and accept but nothing positive ever comes from politics; it never has,  and almost nothing good ever comes through any politician.

Most of the politicians in the US government today appear to have sold their souls to Satan, and will, in most cases, make all their political decisions exactly as they are commanded.  After all, they now answer NOT to the American people, but to their true masters, those who have for decades planned the demise of the American way, the end of our freedoms and  the utter destruction of the United States of America.

To repeat, hope, when placed correctly, is a wonderful thing, but any hope that a politician, ANY politician, will ever return the US government to a truly representative one, and will Make America Great Again, is a seriously misplaced hope, a delusion.

It is time to wake up and KNOW the truth: Politicians have always sold out those whom they are supposed to represent; the ‘sell out’ continues and, in fact, is worsening day by day. Please, please, PLEASE do NOT place any trust and hope in the promises of a politician. That misplaced hope will not bring any positive results, and you will be disappointed.

The only true hope for anyone is in Jesus Christ!

Blessings! And Maranatha!

budaroo@twc.com

©Bud Hancock. All rights reserved.

Khamenei chants ‘Death to America,’ mocks Biden as ‘poor, demented’ man thumbnail

Khamenei chants ‘Death to America,’ mocks Biden as ‘poor, demented’ man

By Jihad Watch

Meanwhile, Biden’s handlers still hope to revive their catastrophic appeasement package known as the Iran nuclear deal.

Iranian Supreme Leader Mocks Biden As Demented As Nuclear Deal Negotiations Stall

by Alana Goodman, Washington Free Beacon, November 23, 2022:

Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei mocked President Joe Biden as a “poor, demented” man and led a crowd in chants of “death to America” during a speech on state television on Saturday.

Biden turned 80 on Sunday, and his age and declining mental sharpness have been a matter of public speculation since his election in 2020.

Khamenei’s comments come as the Biden administration said this week it is still interested in reaching a nuclear deal with Iran, despite a reported stalemate in the negotiations and the Iranian government’s ongoing violent crackdown on nationwide anti-government protests.

In Khamenei’s speech, which was translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute, the Iranian leader claimed that the Islamic Republic’s “advancement” was “intolerable and unbearable for the West.” He criticized U.S. presidents since the 1979 Iranian revolution, singling out Donald Trump as a “dope” and Biden as “demented.”

“America is at the forefront of this campaign by the enemy,” said Khamenei. “All the American presidents, in the decades that have passed since the revolution, have fought the Islamic Republic on that front.”

“Some of them have dropped dead, and some have been cast in the garbage bin of history, even if still alive,” said Khamenei. “This includes the previous dope [Trump] and this poor, demented incumbent guy [Biden].”

At one point in the speech, the crowd launched into a chant of “death to America.”

The Biden administration still has hope that it can reach a nuclear deal with Iran, despite concerns from members of Biden’s own party that the agreement wouldn’t hinder Iran’s nuclear ambitions and would end up sending more funding to the terrorist-financing regime.

U.S. ambassador to Israel Tom Nides this week said a nuclear deal with Iran is “not off the table,” although the Biden administration is “nowhere close” to reaching an agreement with the regime.

“Nothing’s ever off the table,” said Nides. He added that Iran has been an unwilling partner and he was “not holding my breath for any negotiation with the Iranians in this current form.”…

AUTHOR

ROBERT SPENCER

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EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Trainwreck of White-Collar Sympathy thumbnail

The Trainwreck of White-Collar Sympathy

By Dr. Rich Swier

Anthony Esolen: In our sex-crazed culture, it is almost impossible to see the girl who is not tempted – who has determined to obey the moral law. She finds no help anywhere.


David French – the famous political commentator and prominent legal defender of religious liberty – has been wringing his hands, trying to explain to himself and to his fellow Evangelicals why he has flipped on what is called same-sex “marriage.” He worries that the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, establishing a federal right to something that makes neither biological nor anthropological sense, has become settled law. And people have based their lives on it, making decisions that should not be undermined by – as I would put it – any new and surprising surge of judicial humility and honesty by the current Court.

That’s the same justification that Sandra Day O’Connor used to drag her feet on abortion. That, too, was an act of judicial hubris, and it had woven itself into the expectations of young American men and women, who depended upon it as a fail-safe for their lives of pleasure-seeking, material ambition, or boredom.

And it acted as a false teacher, imparting the lesson that our bodies are our own to dispense with as we please, so that in this most important regard – ineradicable from any society’s most fundamental concern, how to replace itself with children – we reverse the wisdom of the poet and claim to be islands unto ourselves.

So it is precisely because the law is a teacher, and precisely because of its wide variety of social implications, that I oppose the Obergefell decision. I do not want the mad, cruel, confused, and lonely society that a fundamental denial of the reality of marriage must produce.

Or I may put it this way. Such a society or anti-society has already been produced by our large-scale abrogation of the moral laws that promote and protect marriage, family life, and the innocence of children. And now that it has been enshrined in constitutional law, it’s been made nearly impossible to reverse, and has been considerably worsened by claiming the unnatural is natural, with additional implications e.g., for genetic engineering and the manufacture of children.

When I wrote Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for SanityI was if anything not pessimistic enough in my predictions. I said that the recognition of homosexual mock marriage would visit a crisis of confusion upon children, especially those whom our prior sins – divorce, fatherlessness – had already rendered vulnerable.

I did not foresee that so many would long to mutilate themselves, loathing their own bodies and their sex, and that a burgeoning industry would arise to meet and to stoke the demand.

I said, and many other people said the same, that the Obergefell decision left us with no rational basis for limiting marriage to two people, and sure enough, “polyamory” is before everyone’s eyes, and “open marriage” has surged up out of the pit of man’s lusts, with a vengeance.

I said that, since so much of the real impetus behind the unnatural is that it is unnatural, or, as they call it, transgressive, we would be removing a guardrail against behavior still more unnatural, and sure enough, we now have drag queens reading sex-and-identity stories to little children, with librarians and schoolteachers smiling along.

I did not predict the wholesale madness of turning pronouns into personal markers, or that people would be punished for not getting them right, or that divorced parents would end up fighting over whether their sons and daughters would get to be neutered, with the sane and truly loving parent threatened with loss of custody if he or she will not comply.

So much of sympathy depends upon where you happen to be looking. That is why people responsible for the common good must take a long and comprehensive view, and permit their sympathies to reach people whom they cannot see, who may not even have been born yet, or who do not seem – do not seem – to be involved in the controversy.

It is easy to see the girl who has tipped over the edge into the unnatural, walking hand-in-hand with the friend whom she thereby designates as sometimes sharing her bed.  It is a lot harder to see the girl who is trying to resist the same temptation, but who finds acceptance and even celebration just a nod of the will away.

It is almost impossible to see the girl who is not so tempted, but who has determined to obey the moral law, and finds no help anywhere, no encouragement, no understanding, and, alas, almost no prospects for marriage and family life.

I’ve long said that the most unpitied person in our world is a lonely teenage boy who doesn’t have the advantage of being on a sports team, who may not have a brother or even a father in the home, who wants to make friends and doesn’t know how, and whom the girls ignore or despise.

In a healthy society, he could still make his way. Nobody would allege anything about him, except that he was quiet. He could ask a girl to a dance, because that’s the sort of thing you do, and there would be no ponderous meaning to it. He would be relieved of much of the pressure of having to prove himself, right here and now.

But that relief is gone, and the pressure has been increased, unbearably, and there are almost no opportunities for normal and gradual growth. What does he do? Where is he even supposed to begin, when everything around him is saturated in a cold, selfish lust?

I don’t half blame David French for not thinking of these things, because almost nobody thinks about them now. Everybody thinks instead about their colleagues at work, how friendly they are, and how you don’t want to hurt their feelings or cause them trouble.

White-collar sympathy for white-collar adults; but what about the marriages never formed in the first place? What about the messed-up children? What rough beast that might still appall French has already slouched in our midst, though we do not want to glance that way?

You may also enjoy some of our most popular columns from the last dozen years:

Fr. Jerry J. Pokorsky’s Who Is the Woman Caught in Adultery?

Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy’s Gnosticism Today

AUTHOR

Anthony Esolen

Anthony Esolen is a lecturer, translator, and writer. Among his books are Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, and Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World, and most recently The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord. He is a professor and writer in residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts, in Warner, New Hampshire. Be sure to visit his new website, Word and Song.

EDITORS NOTE: This Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. © 2022 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

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The power couple on a mission to save the world from demographic disaster

By MercatorNet – Navigating Modern Complexities

Malcolm and Simone Collins have a game plan for pulling humanity back from the brink.


This month, the 8 billionth child entered the world. Demographers believe that the world’s population is moving towards 10 billion. But at some point, the curve will begin to move downwards. Families will shrink. People everywhere (except sub-Saharan Africa) will become older and older, leading to huge burdens on government social services.

The problem is that most countries have birth-rates below replacement level. And no one knows how to coax women into having more children, as China has discovered, to its dismay. It moved from a one-child policy, to a two-child policy, to a three-child policy – and fertility has edged even lower.

What is to be done? A solution comes from an improbable source – wealthy, geeky, tech and venture-capitalist pro-natalism activists.

Chapter 1: Elon talks about it

The eccentric billionaire Elon Musk has been married twice but now describes himself as single. He has had at least nine children with a combination of wives, girlfriends, and surrogates. Here are some of his recent tweets.

Chapter 2: Malcolm and Simone do something about it

Malcolm and Simone Collins radiate powerful self-confidence. As a married couple they have operated companies on five continents that collectively pulled in US$70 million every year; raised a private equity fund; directed strategy at top, early-stage venture capital firms; written three best-selling books; served as managing director of Dialog, an elite retreat for global leaders founded by Peter Thiel; and earned degrees in neuroscience, business, and technology policy from St Andrews, Stanford, and Cambridge.

Before marrying, they committed to having between 7 and 13 children. Since Simone was older, she had to ensure that her age would not be a barrier to their plans for an expanding family. In 2018, which they call the Year of the Harvest, they produced and froze as many embryos as possible. They already have three children: Octavian, Torsten, and Titan Invictus.

The evolutionary logic associated with transhumanism is an important theme in their plans. On the population level, whole cultures are in danger of extinction – like the Japanese or Armenians or Catalans. This would represent a tragic loss of cultural diversity. “We are about to experience the largest cultural mass extinction since the colonial period,” they write. Their “Project Ark” is to save as many cultures as possible by promoting higher birth rates.

On a family level, their proposals involve tinkering with embryos to ensure that their children have “good genes”. Their critics call this “eugenics”. They prefer to call it common sense. “What we advocate for is fairly vanilla—if aggressive—transhumanism: Improving and transforming the human condition with technology. Be against transhumanism all you want, but don’t call it eugenics.”

Chapter 3: Learn all about population implosion at pronatalist.org

From their home in rural Pennsylvania, this highly-connected couple is preaching the gospel of pro-natalism, the latest fad amongst the super-rich in Silicon Valley. For the past 20 or so years, billionaires have been obsessed with longevity – increasing lifespans to hundreds of years. Research on that continues, but some are turning their minds to demography. “The person of this subculture really sees the pathway to immortality as being through having children,” says Simone.

Pronatalist.org, a website created by Malcolm and Simone, alerts readers to the crisis:

Birth rates are falling precipitously around the world in both developed and developing countries. If dramatic action is not taken, we will witness the extinction of entire societies, expansion of totalitarian governments, and an unchecked rise of tribalism.

South Korea’s birth-rate is about 0.81, far below replacement level. The Collinses call this “genocide by inaction”. They have a knack for presenting the consequences of population decline in vivid analogies: “This is equivalent to a disease that wipes out 94% of the population. We need radical solutions to save endangered ethnic groups.”

They even see contemporary politics through a demographic lens:

“If you have ever wondered why different ideological factions in politics seem to be able to agree on less and less as time goes on, why they are becoming more authoritarian, and why tribalism seems to be increasing: You are witnessing the invisible hand of demographic collapse at work.

“Population numbers will eventually rebound within a few hundred years, but progress the world has made in terms of women’s rights, freedom of speech, environmentalism, racial equality, gay rights, etc. runs the risk of systematic erasure if we fail to intervene.”

What’s the answer? Only a profound cultural change will save us, they argue. Tax credits and baby bonuses are just tinkering around the edges:

“Only cultures with a strong external motivation to have kids are well above repopulation rate at the moment; all others will enter the dustbin of history. Essentially, every world culture that does not have strong religious convictions or educate and treat women as equals is being systematically deleted. …

“A single family having eight kids that successfully passes that practice to their own children can save their entire ethnic group. (One family having eight kids for ten generations leads to over a billion descendants.)”

Chapter 4: Malcolm and Simone have a survival plan

The best-known groups with high fertility are all religious. About a quarter of Israel’s population will be Haredi Jews by 2050, according to a recent estimate. In 1980, they were an insignificant minority of 4 percent. The American Amish may have the world’s highest birthrate; one demographer joked that in 200 years, all Americans will be Amish.

Of course, Malcolm and Simone are not conventionally religious. If pressed, they describe themselves as “secular Calvinists”. They are not Sunday church-goers but they are hard-working, hard-driving, abstemious, frugal souls on a mission from … Evolution.

Their unconventionally religious stand is to encourage fans to create family cultures which welcome children. “We’re trying to create a playbook for people who want to work their values and morals into durable cultures that are far more likely to endure intergenerationally (rather than go extinct due to low birth rates),” Simone explained in an email to MercatorNet. “One can create a durable culture from scratch, without any religious element, or one can reinforce an existing religion or culture to make it ‘durable’ (capable of lasting intergenerationally).”

They have nearly finished writing another book which sketches their philosophy of the intertwined themes of demography, evolution, family structure, and religion, called The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion. “At its core,” they write, “this book is a meditation on how we can intentionally construct a culture/religion that will be ‘evolutionarily successful’ and spread.”

They have a Sisyphean job ahead of them. As they observe wryly: “It may be easier to coax a caged panda to reproduce than it would be to convince a cosmopolitan progressive to raise their own kid.”

Malcolm and Simone describe themselves as conservative Republicans, although in some ways, they are fully-paid-up progressives. They will be attending the LGBT-friendly Log Cabin Republican shindig at Mar-a-Lago in mid-December. They endorse experimental family structures, and their views on moral issues would disconcert traditional Christians.

But beneath the hipster veneer, they really are the “secular Calvinists” they claim to be. They are not shy of expressing stern and judgemental views about “pop culture” which offers sex, power, acceptance, prestige, wealth, and the life of Riley without hard work. They take a dim view of the “cultural super virus” – which is how practicing secular Calvinist hipsters describe woke culture.

As an aside, they are nonchalant about woke lunacies. From an evolutionary perspective, they contend, bad ideas literally go extinct. That cultural super virus is “a sterilizing disease and almost none of its husks reproduce above repopulation rate, hence our grandkids likely won’t have to deal with them.”

And on family dynamics, they are astonishingly conventional. They point out in their book that the best motivation for the next generation to have kids is a happy home life as a child:

“If a young girl grows up and sees her mom and people like her overburdened, unloved, and ignored by society, why would she choose to have kids herself? Why would she aspire to that? While we can’t fix this at the societal level, we can address this problem intentionally-designed cultures. If you want to create a durable culture for your family and inspire your children to have kids of their own, one of the best things you can do is ensure you have a strong relationship with your spouse. 

“For our family, this means ensuring daughters see their mothers glorified, appreciated, and even deified within family culture for the sacrifices they make while also demonstrating that none of those sacrifices require foregoing a career or stepping back from public life.”

In some respects, they may be even sterner than their God-fearing Calvinist forebears. Child-bearing is natural for women, they write in their book. There’s no reason to exaggerate its difficulties:

“In our House, having kids is just part of the yearly routine. While Simone is appreciated for it, she never hints that it would be justified for her to use pregnancy or childbirth as an excuse to step back from work. The productive glorification of motherhood requires never giving into society’s tendency to conflate gratitude and approval with justification to winge, whine, indulge, or lean out.”

No way that these guys have been infected by the “cultural super virus”!

Chapter 5: networking for pro-natalism

The Collinses want you to join them. “We are actively building a diverse network of families with the grit to make it through this maelstrom,” they say on the website. “If you are committed to a high birth rate and building a healthy culture for your family, we want to talk!”

AUTHOR

Michael Cook

Michael Cook is the editor of MercatorNet. He lives in Sydney, Australia. More by Michael Cook

EDITORS NOTE: This MercatorNet column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.