Cancel Culture is Coward Culture

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Randall Smith to college students: Want your diploma handed to you without effort or mastery on your part? Go somewhere else. You’re not tough enough for the real world. 

The disgruntled, like the poor, we will always have with us. Grumbling is not just something God’s people do in the wilderness. It has been a common feature of human life ever since Eve asked, “But why can’t we eat the apple?” and ever since Adam told God: “Yeah, sure, all the animals are great, but I’m still lonely.”

There will always be people who will complain. There have been bullies ever since Cain beat the life out of his brother Abel. What we have not always had in such large numbers are quite so many cowards who refuse to stand up to such people.

A friend and I have a joke about the phrase, “Is it too much to ask. . .?” Whenever you preface something with this phrase, it is understood that it is too much to ask, but shouldn’t be. If you say, “Is it too much to ask that the waiter would get my order right?” it’s because he didn’t.

So here’s my question. Is it too much to ask that corporate CEOs and university administrators, who get one of these increasingly ubiquitous, self-righteous “virtue-signaling” complaints about something or someone, would simply brace up and say: “No, I’m sorry; I’m not giving in to your emotional blackmail. Take it somewhere else”?

The answer to that question would appear to be the same as the answer to the question: Is it too much to ask that politicians would actually be consistent in applying moral indignation?

Would that some university president somewhere in one of these dust-ups would simply release a statement that says:

I am sorry you are offended, but one of our fundamental principles is freedom of speech. We respect your right to protest and complain, but the same right that protects you also protects them. We will not shut down the free exchange of ideas. If you want to shut down the free exchange of ideas, then you want another institution – probably another country. Did you mistake this for East Germany circa the 1950s perhaps? So you can gather all the mobs you want, either on-line or out in front of our offices, but we’re not giving in to the demands of an irrational mob. Come and make your case with solid arguments. We promise to listen respectfully. But please understand: our policy is “Everyone has a voice; no one has a veto.” If you make a good case, we just might change our practices. But if you come with nothing but vilification and threats of violence, we will simply shut the door and go about our business. Oh, and please don’t misunderstand: we will defend the property and heritage handed down to us by our forebears. So if you come here to tear down and destroy and not to discuss, we will have you arrested. If you assume our will to defend what has been built here is weaker than your will to destroy it, you would be making a very big mistake.

A female friend writes to say that, “The first thing any university could do that wishes to survive is to quit tossing the word ‘leadership’ around without ever exercising any. Civilized people do not practice cancel culture, and Christians certainly should not. When the mob tried to cancel the woman caught in adultery, Jesus was the woman’s strong defense.”

“Leaders,” she continues, “do not throw good people under the bus for trivial matters.” Leaders lead, they don’t just “manage.” They help form diverse groups of people into a community. They do not press the “eject” button on someone the moment the mob arrives at the door. Offering to throw his daughter to the mob at his door did not work for Lot, and it will not work for any of today’s cowardly lions either.

No one can guarantee success in the current educational market. But it would be nice if at least one university marketed itself as the place to study if you are brave and have the guts to test your ideas against the best minds of all time. You can disagree. You can disagree vigorously. We welcome it. But you better be ready with some tough, well thought-out arguments. If you want “safe,” then stay at home and live in your parents’ basement.

Do you want your diploma handed to you without much effort or mastery on your part? Go somewhere else. You’re not tough enough for us. Here you are going to work for it. It will be intense. But at the end of four years, you will have developed relationships that will last a lifetime, and you will have learned to be mature and resilient in a way that none of your peers from any other institution can touch. They will be shouting and throwing tantrums. You will be talking seriously with others who disagree with you, thinking through problems, and building together with them.

We don’t mollycoddle people who want to be “managers”; we form servant leaders. And here’s how you can tell. We do not just slavishly follow whatever fad others in the academic world happen to be running after. We do not trim out sails to the prevailing winds. We have principles. They guide us. We don’t sell them out. We are willing to question them and analyze them and subject them to serious critique. But we don’t spout empty slogans that have no meaning.

We adhere to these principles as faithfully as we can because we believe they are the best means to human flourishing, both as individuals and as a community. You don’t have to like them; we need not like your principles either. But we do have to learn to live together in peace. If you want us to bow to your idols, I’m sorry, but the answer is no. So it’s probably best to be clear on that right up front.

Now that’s the appeal I want to hear. I mean, is that too much to ask?

COLUMN BY

Randall Smith

Randall B. Smith is a tenured Full Professor of Theology. His book Reading the Sermons of Thomas Aquinas: A Guidebook for Beginners is available from Emmaus Press. And his book Aquinas, Bonaventure, and the Scholastic Culture at Paris: Preaching, Prologues, and Biblical Commentary is due out from Cambridge University Press in the fall.

EDITORS NOTE: This Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2020 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.

All Lies Matter

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This is my fifth review of a children’s propagandist library book.  “Tasting the Sky” described Barakat’s childhood.  “Balcony on the Moon” covers her high school years and her ongoing pursuit for Palestine.

Ramallah-born Ibtisam Barakat, a kind, intelligent child, has become a thoughtful, accomplished young woman.  She excelled in her studies and defied Islamic custom by breaking free of an early arranged marriage to pursue her education.

In her book, Balcony on the Moon, she explains that she was born in “Palestine,” but questions why it appears nowhere on a map.  Except for the nineteen years of Jordan’s rule over its “West Bank,” it was historically Judea (from which is derived “Jew”) and Samaria.  The name Palestine was a Roman-contrived insult to the Jews, a taunt of their ancient Cretan enemies, the Philistines.

Ibtisam’s surname, Barakat, is Egyptian.  Her mother is Bedouin, a nomadic people.  There is no history, government, language, culture, literature, monetary system, or archaeological evidence of a Palestinian nation.

As further explanation, the following is my abridgement of Efraim Karsh’s The Privileged Palestinian“Refugee.”

After World War II and the displacement of millions, the UN General Assembly organized the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in December 1946.  Only the Arab escapees of the 1948-49 war received their own relief agency with 110 times the money allocated to others worldwide, although they did not meet the conventional refugee concepts.  They were not unprovoked victims, but the aggressors who should have compensated their Jewish and Israeli victims.  They were not displaced victims because they remained in their country of nationality, and they had no fear of persecution because Israel did not persecute them.  Israel’s future prime minister, Ben Gurion, promised them equality without exception, no harm, no expulsion, but peaceful coexistence with Israel’s Arab population.  Nevertheless, the UN blindly registered the false claimants as refugees, a lie, even adding new non-Palestinian arrivals to the roster.

They could not return to their dwellings in Judea and Samaria, Jordan’s West Bank, because Egypt and Jordan prohibited them, and Israel was awaiting a workable peace plan.  Those who fled to Jordan became Jordanian citizens.  And had King Hussein not attacked, there would have been no war, no refugees, and the West Bank would have remained Jordan’s.

Within months of its creation, UNRWA should have yielded control to the host countries and ended UN support for the works program on June 30, 1951, but it didn’t.  The Arabs refused to improve their condition and, instead, demanded increased and improved medical and education services.  The works program became a relief operation for an exaggerated number of Arabs; the mission of reintegration was all but abandoned by 1956.

Seventeen thousand displaced Jews in Israel plus hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries were absorbed into Israel’s citizenry, but the Arabs perpetuated their entitlement status of welfare recipients for generations, now in its 72nd year of eternal refugeedom.  Each time the Arabs were offered a large expanse of land, they refused and went to war.  They remain in the West Bank and in Gaza, hoping to someday conquer Israel and rename it Palestine for themselves.

Ibtisam Barakat’s Author’s Note begins: “When I mention that I am Palestinian, I am often asked: but where is Palestine on the map?”  She defines it geographically as an area ruled by many nations, Ottoman governance until World War I and a British military mandate until 1948.  (TK-This was followed by Jordanian control for 19 years following its attack on Israel, until Jordan lost another attack in 1967, when Israel, the victor, was forced into administering the territory.  It is now called “disputed land,” not Palestine.)

Ibtisam continued that Israel became a state because of the Holocaust, an incorrect, perpetuated lie.  Theodore Herzl, journalist, playwright, and visionary began bringing the centuries of love of Zion (Israel) to the world in the 1800s.  Ibtisam said that Britain had suppressed Palestinian aspirations for freedom, not true, a lie, and that Israel had been established on three-quarters of the mandate, also untrue, a lie.  The Jews were betrayed in several ways over 100 years, one being that 78% of the land originally promised to them became Jordan, and the Arabs west of the Jordan River declined statehood.  They were Egyptians, Yemenites, Iraqis and sundry nomadic tribes, not Palestinians.  They adopted the term in 1967 to support their victimhood narrative (a lie) with its lure of financial aid and the eventual goal of eradicating the Jews.  They eschewed statehood and independence.

During and after the Holocaust, many Jews returned to their homeland (then a borderless swath of land known as Palestine) and embraced Zionism, the movement to re-create the Jewish state.  After tirelessly petitioning for an independent state in their homeland, Israel became a UN-recognized, independent nation in 1948.  Tension between Jews and Arabs a constant, now escalated, and the neighboring Arabs immediately waged war against the nascent state.

Lest Ibtisam or the reader continue the belief that the upheaval rests with Israel’s rebirth, we must return to the history of Islamic Jihad, beginning with Mohammed’s slaughter of Meccan Jews in 620 CE to the present.  The Quran commands violence.  Muslims must convert or eliminate all non-Muslims.  Mohammed founded the deadly cult of Islam, his words encouraging Islam’s children to relinquish their lives so as to take the lives of others.  Only Islam has this unique fanaticism of a self-sustaining religious component that feeds on the psychological weaknesses of humans who fear the unknown and need a secure hereafter.  This is what drives them to accept suicide bombings, fight holy wars, force conversions, and slaughter humans – the comfort that their view is must be followed by the rest of the world.

Ibtisam continues her story of family and school, surrounded by war and war stories.  She is never taught that their leadership refuses statehood and independence at every opportunity, and that her people’s political narrative of victimhood is a fallacy, another lie.  Just as she seeks independence, so too could her people have done the same.  The key was in their own hands.

In ninth grade, she learns about Dalal al-Mughrabi, the female terrorist  responsible for the 1978 Coastal Road massacre in Israel, killing 39 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, and compares 30 hours of fierce offensive terrorism with Menachem Begin’s defensive actions.   Attempting to equate an act of terror and slaughter with Israel’s self-protection is an invention, a lie.  She learns to create her own newspaper by reversing roles, featuring the terrorist Dalal as the embodiment of heroism, courage and resistance.

With each bomb explosion, she believes that armed Israeli settlers are taking Palestinian property.  She has bought the war of words, using settlers to mean colonizers, when these Jews are the progeny of the indigenous people of thousands of years before who hold the legal title deed to the land of Israel.  Not only can the Jewish people claim an eternal covenant to the land of Canaan given them by God in Genesis 13-17, but upon their return from exile in the late 1890s, they bought the desolate land at exorbitant prices from the absentee Arab landlords who had laid claim to the land under the Ottoman Empire.

Our writer looks back, but not far enough. For her, the conflict began when Jews said they would rebuild Israel on Jewish land, and purchased or restored fallow or swamp land in the early 1900s.  But it began long before.  From the Prophet’s jihad against Arabs (622-634);  to the Jewish tribes (624), to Zoroastrians (634-651), to Byzantine Christians (634-1453), Berbers (650-700), Hindus (638-1857), Christian Coptic Egyptians (640-655), Nubians (650), Turks (651-751), Spaniards (711-730), Franks (720-732), Chinese (751), Sicilians (812-940), Armenians and Georgians (1071-1920), Mongols (1260-1300), Albania (1332-1853), Serbs, Croats and Albanians (1334-1920), Romania (1350-1699), Bulgaria (1350-1853), Croatia (1389-1843), Poland (1444-1599), Indonesians and Malays (1450-1500), Assyrians, Armenians and Greeks (1450-1853), Russia (1500-1683), Hungarians (1500-1683), Germany (1529 – ongoing), Yazidis (1640), Austrians (1683), and into modernity – Israelis, Americans, British, Russians, Norwegians, Swedes, Thais, Nigerians, Australia –jihad is now global.  The International Union of Muslim Scholars calls on all Muslims to spread incitement to terror and extremism, for Palestinians to “seek death so as to be given life.”

Certainly, Ibtisam has not studied true Islamic history and she would be shocked to learn of the centuries of bloodshed, and it is possible that she would deny that history.  In Islam, lies are acceptable if the purpose is deemed worthy.  Mohammed set the laws: it was right to take land from others, to steal women from conquered men, and to make and break treaties for conquest.

The concept was significant when Ibtisam was taking her final high school exam, and her proctor asked if she would help a girl who was crying because she had no student enough to complete the questions.  Ibtisam reasoned that this would not qualify as cheating because Islam justifies lying if it is done to help a fellow Muslim.  She did not reason that if this incompetent student is accepted into college and subsequently drops out, the space she appropriated from a capable student is now lost.  The help for one came at the expense of another, and the lie has now become theft, perhaps even life-altering.

The Palestinians who once identified with other Arab countries came to Israel and now occupy land they lost in their war of aggression against Israel, previously Jordan’s, previously Ottoman, previously a host of other ruling entities.  Wars change boundaries.  Until Israel chooses to annex the area, the Palestinians will continue to have meager health services because their huge funds are funneled to the PA for weapons and awards for mothers of martyrs.  Today’s Arabs are tired of Arab corruption and more freely express that they prefer life under Netanyahu.  They want an Israeli ID to work freely in Israel, a parliamentary democracy.

Saudi writer Abdulhameed Al-Ghobain tells the Arabic media that he and others support Israel’s annexation of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.  He states, “There was a call for establishing a Palestinian state. The Palestinians, the Arabs, and even the Arab league refused to recognize that there should be a Palestine state.  Maybe if a Palestinian state had been established, the situation would be different.  So for us to be waiting all these years, destroying our Arab nation, destroying our economies and not achieving anything . . . I arrived at the conclusion that this cause has not been a real and just cause at any point in history.  The Palestinian cause is an illusion … nothing to do with reality.”

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Was Joseph, husband of Mary, the example of a perfect man?

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The Birth of Jesus Foretold Luke 1:26-38:

26 In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee,
27 to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary.
28 The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”
29 Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be.
30 But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God.
31 You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus.
32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David,
33 and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.”
34 “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”
35 The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.
36 Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month.
37 For no word from God will ever fail.”
38 “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.

What does it mean to be a husband? What does it mean to be a man?

In my mind one of the great, if not the greatest of, men in the New Testament was Joseph of Nazareth. Joseph was a craftsman, an older man, who was given a task that few men of his time would have be able to endure. For you see Joseph was chosen by God to become the husband of the Virgin Mary. Joseph was tasked with the duty to raise the Son of God. Joseph was the corporeal father of Jesus Christ.

According to Matthew 1:18

This is how the birth of Jesus the Messiah came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit.

Joseph is the unique example of a man thrust into circumstances that few, if any, men of his time could understand or even survive. Joseph was tasked to be the man to raise the Son of God in the most most difficult time in history, the Roman occupation of Israel.

Today, husbands and men are under siege by forces that want to destroy the bedrock of every culture, the family. Forces bent on destroying the ideas and ideals of fatherhood, husbandry and manly faithfulness to one’s wife and children.

According to the American Psychological Association:

In Western cultures, more than 90 percent of people marry by age 50. Healthy marriages are good for couples’ mental and physical health. They are also good for children; growing up in a happy home protects children from mental, physical, educational and social problems. However, about 40 to 50 percent of married couples in the United States divorce. The divorce rate for subsequent marriages is even higher.

It is important to understand what being a husband really means should be by looking at the challenges that faced by Joseph.

First, Joseph was betrothed to Mary. Joseph then learns that Mary is pregnant before he and she were married. In the time of Joseph women who were betrothed and became pregnant were stoned to death. Marrying an already pregnant woman before his marriage was consumated would have been against Joseph’s Jewish beliefs. Marrying Mary would be against all that Joseph was raised to believe in. It would have challenged his manhood. It would change his life forever.

Was Joseph the perfect man?

Joseph was the right man, in the right place at the right time. He was betrothed to Mary, the woman who would become pregnant with the Son of God.

In the Catholic Church Joseph is the Patron Saint of unborn children, fathers, immigrants, workers, employment, explorer, pilgrims, traveler, carpenters, engineers, realtors, against doubt and hesitation, and of a happy death according to Wikipedia.

Joseph is first mentioned in the New Testament in Luke 2:4,  “So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David.”

While Joseph was not wealthy he was devout. He lived in Nazareth in Galilee. He was a man who worked hard as a craftsman, who most probably  worked in stone, as there was little wood in the Middle East.

Then Joseph was given a task like no other. Amy Peeler wrote:

Joseph, husband of Mary, plays a dramatic role in Jesus’s early life. However, he is rarely mentioned and often disappears from view. Who is this often under-appreciated figure, and why is he important?

Peeler notes:

Mary’s prospects would have been tenuous, if not outright dangerous if Joseph had abandoned Mary. In order to see that, readers need to understand some of the norms of marriage in the first century CE.

[ … ]

In the interim time, Mary became pregnant. Upon discovering this, Joseph was within his rights to expose the pregnancy publicly and decry his involvement. Based on Deut 22:21, Mary could have been stoned, but there are no records that the full extent of this law was executed in the first century. The more common option would be to shame her publicly, to bring her before the town council.

Joseph chose to be the husband of Mary and to raise her son, the Son of God.

God spoke to Joseph on four occasions

According to the New Testament an angel from God spoke to Joseph, the husband of Mary. What would any man do if an angel spoke to him? Ignore it? Deny it? Embrace it?

Here are the four passages where God spoke to Joseph through an angel. According to Biography:

After marrying Mary, Joseph found that she was already pregnant, and being “a just man and unwilling to put her to shame” (Matt. 1:19), he decided to divorce her quietly, knowing that if he did so publicly, she could be stoned to death. An angel, however, came to Joseph and told him that the child Mary carried was the son of God and was conceived by the Holy Spirit, so Joseph kept Mary as his wife.

After Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem, an angel came to Joseph again, this time to warn him and Mary about King Herod of Judaea and the violence he would bring down upon the child. Joseph then fled to Egypt with Mary and Jesus, and the angel appeared again, telling Joseph that Herod had died and instructing him to return to the Holy Land.

We do not know what happened to Joseph. Biography says this:

The circumstances of Joseph’s death are not known, but it is likely that he died before Jesus’s ministry began, and it is implied that he was dead before the Crucifixion (John 19:26-27).

Was Joseph the perfect man? Should all men try to become like Joseph? Do we need to restore manhood in America? You decide.

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Drain the Islam Swamp

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Islam is akin to violence. Violence is the core of Islam and it has been ever since the time of Muhammad in Medina by Muhammad’s own edict and conducts. Without violence of all kinds, Islamic ideology would undergo a slow death. Violence is the lifeblood of Islam. Take away violence and you shut down the blood supply from the body of this nefarious cult.

We need to realize Islam is violent, not only against non-Muslims, but it is also violent against its own numerous sects and offshoots. Even within every sect and offshoot violence in the most savage ways is practiced. Just to name some examples: public lashing, cutting off hands for stealing even a morsel of bread, blinding convicts or hanging them, stoning the so-called adulterers, castrating sexual offenders and hanging of homosexuals. That is Islam in a nutshell.

There are abundant examples of violence committed in the name of Islam by Islamic terrorists. I refer to two previous terror attacks. The Manchester suicide bombing that killed 22 people including children and Islamist massacre of Jewish children in Toulouse, France.

You may ask who mass-murdered Manchester’s Children? A deranged British national Muslim Salman Abedi, son of Libyan parents? That is what the official disclosure stated. Wrong. In the same way that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, creatures like this betrayer are instruments of mayhem and mass murder nurtured and used by his Islamist handlers in complicity with the permissive self-serving left and politicians.

Draining the swamp is a popular rallying slogan these days in reference to the Washington cabal of leeches sucking dry the vitality of this nation to feed their own voracious appetite. Good luck with that Mr. President.

The swamp has been around for a long time and shows the promise of not only surviving but even devouring anyone thinking of disturbing it.

And everyone knows that one cannot kill every single mosquito a swamp produces. It is, therefore, draining it the only sure way of eliminating the mosquitoes — the swamp by its very design produces.

Now, mass murderers like this evil, Salman Abedi, are the natural products of the swamp called Islam. For as long as this Islam swamp is around, more and more killers will send forth to the world. There is no realistic way of keeping track of these individual killers of Allah. Even when they are known to the authorities as clear risks — like the children-killer Salman — the nihilist, anything-goes left and politicians defend the rights of these ticking bombs.

The swamp is the problem. The vested interest exploiters of this muck called Islam are the Saudis, the mullahs of Iran, and a whole host of other beneficiaries that keep supplying it with the murky muck it needs.

This Islam swamp, billed as the one and only true religion of Allah must be exposed for what it is and stamped out. The left and its permissive Islam apologists are complicit in the most crime of mass murder such as Manchester, Toulouse and hundreds of others.

Savagery by Islamists is carried out in the same ritualistic manner as they prostrate multiple times toward Mecca in tribute to Allah and his emissary Muhammad. Yet, from time to time, and much more often these days, the devotees of Muhammad manage atrocities that are beyond the pale. The massacre, in cold blood, of three Jewish children and a rabbi in front of a school in Toulouse, France, represents the ultimate in a most dastardly act, even in the shameful annals of this cult of violence.

What makes any creature, much less a human, brim himself with enough hatred to walk to three young children and shoot them in the head? To complete the heinous act, he also shot the rabbi in the same manner, got back on his motorbike and sped away.

Islam has a great advantage of the first call on the new arrival. It is an omnipresent system with masses of believers, mosques and madrasahs, and a host of other social and economic organizations that overpower the person and steer him into the same fold; it is a sea of people who seem to know what they are all about, what life and death are all about, and what one must also do.

How to drain the Islam swamp? It is not that easy. Massive efforts are required – on the one hand, to drain the breeding swamps of the Islamic disease, while on the other hand helping Muslims adopt an alternative perspective of life that addresses their perplexities and offers a degree of comfort that religions dispense without pitting one segment of humanity against another.

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Heads-Up Jewish Americans–Democrats Are Your Enemies!

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It’s quite simple for me, as it should be for all Jews, given the fact that in a world of about eight-billion people, we Jews are a miniscule 15 million, only about six-million in the United States, eight-million in Israel, and another one-million around the world. That is equivalent to the proverbial drop in the ocean.

A PRESSING IMPERATIVE

If we Jews and our supporters don’t aggressively address the pandemic of anti-Semitism that is galloping around the globe and exploding here in America, rampant on college campuses, aided and abetted by a craven media that gives credibility to career hate-mongers like Louis Farrakhan and his ilk, and even contaminating the hallowed halls of the U.S. Congress––with more floridly hate-Jews/hate-Israel Democrats than ever before in history––then we know from our tragic history that annihilation could be right around the corner.

Sadly the Democrat Party of old––of JFK, Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Senator and VP Walter Mondale, et al––has vanished, replaced by Democrats like “the squad” who spew their poisonous hatred of Jews and Israel from the House of Representatives itself. Then there are those who remain thunderously silent––including elected Democrat Jews like Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, Jerrold Nadler, Eliot Engel, Adam Schiff, Richard Blumenthal, as well Democrat Representatives from Long Island––with a huge Jewish population––Tom Suozzi and Kathleen Rice.

Don’t be fooled by the boilerplate, politically correct press releases written by their aides. Once these statements are made public, these cowards go back to cowering before the radical leftists who now call the shots in the Democrat Party, most prominently the racists who continue to vent their anti-Semitic bile to this day.

WHERE DID ALL THE ADVOCATES GO?

Shockingly, most of the Jewish organizations that once supported and defended Jews in America abandoned those roles, having caved to their biggest donors’ conversion to a new religion called “Social Justice.” These are the quislings who “reach out” to––in essence, endorse––groups like Black Lives Matter, Antifa and others that wantonly attack synagogues, Jewish businesses and ordinary Jewish citizens walking in their neighborhoods, and brazenly promote the Boycott-Divest-Sanction (BDS) movement to destroy Israel through economic strangulation.

For instance, The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), founded in 1913, aggressively and successfully fulfilled its mission to “stop the defamation of the Jewish people” until 102 years after its founding when, in 2015, Jonathan Greenblatt became the ADL’s national director and CEO. Greenblatt worked for three far-left regimes antagonistic to Israel––the Clinton Administration, the Obama fiasco, and the George Soros-funded Aspen Institute. Now, Mr. Greenblatt sounds deranged when he states that “only a small number” of the Black Lives Matter anarchy group don’t like Jews, when he knows full well––and Americans can see with their own eyes––that it is one of the most rabidly Jew- and Israel-loathing groups in the world!

According to columnist and author Rabbi Aryeh Spero, the ADL under Greenblatt “has betrayed its original mission of fighting anti-Semites by forging a new partnership with one of America’s most notorious anti-Semites, Al Sharpton.”

But the ADL is only one example out of nearly a dozen that I place in the category of turncoats against the Jewish people. [More on this in a future article].

AMERICA TO THE RESCUE

I have always felt safe in America, protected by the powerful principles of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, by the always-reliable police-and-fire departments in every community where I’ve lived, and by local, state and national leaders of both political parties who fought to preserve our extraordinary way of life through our country’s bedrock foundations of God, family, freedom and safety.

But with the advent of the well-organized, heavily financed emergence of the Jew-hating, Christian-hating, America-hating “Cancel Culture,” what can people do? Yes, they can call or write a letter or e-mail to their elected representative, for which they’ll get back a form letter written by an intern.

But a sure-fire cure for this downward plunge into the sewers of our body politic is to vote out every Democrat running for office. Not one of these America-loathing, anarchist-supporting people is worthy of representing either their constituents or America itself.

Just ask them. They will tell you that they “support” the terrorism––which they call “protests”––we’ve been witnessing for the last several weeks, that they want to raise your taxes, cut funding to the police and military that protect you and your children, institute the socialized medicine and education that have failed in every country they’ve ever been instituted, and enact the Big Government programs that “protect” you from cradle to grave.

November 3, 2020, could change your life forever. If you believe in self-preservation, be smart!

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CHRISTIANS: “Wake Up . . . Marxists Want to Tear Down Jesus!” [Video]

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TOM TRENTO, Director of The United West carefully details the Marxist roots of the evil organization, “Black Lives Matter,” and how they, along with the Democrat Party, are targeting Jesus Christ as the next symbolic statue that needs to be violently destroyed in order to usher in socialism, on their way to a utopian Communism.

WATCH:

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Jewish Federations are Promoting a Farrakhan Fan Who Told Jews to “Go F___ Themselves”

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Your local Jewish Community Center is helping Chelsea Handler sell books.

“It was powerful for me the way he spelled it out,” Chelsea Handler said of Louis Farrakhan. “So whatever, you know, everybody can go f___ themselves.”

Handler, a comedian pushing a new book, was responding to the backlash over her praise for the racist black supremacist leader on Instagram. The people complaining about her praise for the bigot were Jews. And the celebrity was telling critics, including Holocaust survivors, to go “f___ themselves.”

Farrakhan had called Hitler a “great man”, ranted about “Satanic Jews”, and, more recently, claimed that Florida was suffering from the coronavirus because he had asked Allah to punish Cuban Jews.

In that same speech, he thanked Chelsea Handler for posting a clip of him on Instagram.

Handler decided to promote the antisemitic hate group leader to her 4 million followers as part of her newly woke brand which included a Netflix special, Hello, Privilege. It’s Me, Chelsea, and her book, Life Will Be the Death of Me, from Penguin Random House. The theme of both the special and the book was Handler’s journey from self-absorption to wokeness by ranting about how horrible white people are.

Farrakhan had been ranting about how horrible white people are since Chelsea was in kindergarten.

“I learned a lot from watching this powerful video,” Handler had told her followers

The obnoxious celebrity was well aware of Farrakhan’s antisemitism, and defended him, arguing that, “perhaps Farrakhan’s anti-Semitic views took form during his own oppression.”

While some celebrities have been cancelled for the smallest of missteps, there was no apparent sign that Penguin Random House or HBO Max, which will be airing a new standup special by Handler, were ending their relationship with the hateful celebrity. But perhaps something was happening behind the scenes because after telling Jews to “go f__ themselves”, she finally apologized and deleted the video.

The apology was stiff and unconvincing, but it was enough for her book tour to go forward, not just at Penguin Random House, owned by Bertelsmann, the massive German media giant whose owner had donated to the SS, put out exciting fare such as,  “The Christmas Book of the Hitler Youth”, and benefited from Jewish slave labor during the Holocaust, but at Jewish federations around America.

After Handler touted an antisemitic bigot and told Jews who didn’t like it to “go f___ themselves”, the Miami Jewish Federation is touting a Zoom evening with Chelsea Handler to sell her new book.

The 39th Annual Berrin Family Jewish Book Festival features Chelsea and her book, courtesy of the Alper JCC in Miami, and the JCCs of Atlanta, Boulder, Dallas, Ft. Lauderdale, Indianapolis, Nashville, Memphis, and St. Louis, who have all taken Chelsea’s advice and are “f____” themselves and their communities.

No word on whether they’re also willing to help sell “The Christmas Book of the Hitler Youth”.

Why exactly does Handler, who is descended from a German mother and Jewish father, whose grandfather was a Nazi soldier, and who once had her sidekick dress up as Hitler to celebrate Germany’s World Cup victory, and then touted a bigot who admires Hitler, belong at a family Jewish book festival?

The answer is that the Jewish federations of nine major cities are telling Jews to “f___” themselves.

It’s not just that politically correct antisemitism leads to very little in the way of a response from mainstream society, or even from the organizations that claim to represent local Jewish communities, but those same organizations actually help mainstream and reward the promoters of antisemitism.

Chelsea Handler knows perfectly well that she can promote Farrakhan or mock the Holocaust, and local Jewish federations will still eagerly line up to help her sell her books and make her even richer.

The Alper JCC claims that its mission is “providing programs and services that are rooted in and promote Jewish values, ethics and traditions”. The Aaron Family JCC in Dallas claims that it wants an “environment defined by Jewish values and culture”. The Marcus JCC in Atlanta claims that it’s dedicated to “strengthening Jewish life” and creating “Jewish moments”.

Which Jewish values does Chelsea Handler represent besides a suicidal embrace of leftist politics?

The only references to Jewishness in Life Will Be the Death of Me are negative or derogatory, and revolve around her Jewish father’s response to the death of her brother. Even without the Farrakhan, Hitler, and Holocaust stuff, Handler would be the last person to be associated with Jewish values.

But so are the Jewish federations and JCCs that made the hateful decision to help her sell books.

The unwillingness of organizations with lots of J’s and little Jewishness in them to take even the most basic of stands by cancelling an event with the granddaughter of a Nazi soldier who defended antisemitism and told Jews to “go f___ themselves” isn’t cowardice: it’s disinterest and contempt.

They don’t care.

They didn’t care during the Holocaust when millions of Jews were being killed. They didn’t care when Islamic armies and terrorists spent generations trying to wipe out the Jews of Israel. They don’t care about the big stuff, let alone the little stuff, like their celeb promoting a bigot who called Jews termites.

The vast infrastructure of the Jewish federations and the JCCs, the campus Hillels and the alphabet soup of national organizations, is a rotted mass of deadwood built long ago by people who at least had some distant sense that being Jewish mattered in some way. Built by German Jews, funded by deceased Jewish philanthropists, many of whom survived the Holocaust, they’re now just a sinecure for full-time professional non-profit fundraisers with their “inspiring” clergy and their incubators for leftist activists.

They exist to cadge money from elderly Jews who think that funding a building or a book festival with their name on it at the local JCC will be a meaningful legacy, instead of a forum for a Farrakhan supporter, by filling their fundraising letters with mentions of Jewish values, ethics, meaning, and other things they can’t define and don’t believe in. What do they believe in? As little as Chelsea Handler does.

They believe that Black Lives Matter, that the planet is in danger, that whatever Israel did last week was wrong, and whatever else their intellectual cohort of social media lefties happens to believe this week.

They’re as ignorant of what the Torah says as of the contours of the Martian mountains, but like the bigot they’re eagerly hosting, they know how to jump on the bandwagon of the cultural moment. The problem with actual Jewish values is that they are as eternal as their Creator and don’t fit into trends.

The cultural moment and its politics are momentary, filled with obvious contradictions when you try to apply them beyond the hashtags and the memes of the now. Jewish ethics and values might ask why antisemitism is acceptable, when racism isn’t, but the cultural moment has no use for consistency.

To be eternally in the moment is to have neither values nor ethics, Jewish or otherwise, and no future.

The vast billion-dollar infrastructure of organizations that are Jewish in name only are as happy to put their membership lists at the disposal of Chelsea Handler and Bertelsmann, as of Black Lives Matter. They stand for nothing, except for whatever members of their cohort are standing for now, and they make no impact on the Jewish community, and have no future once the donors and the money run out.

Chelsea Handler, like many of the celebs these organizations promote, represents them all too well.

There are no children, no values, and no future, but right now the drinks are flowing and the money is coming in as long as you spew whatever garbage is in the cultural moment without thinking about it.

Chelsea Handler’s book is titled, Life Will Be the Death of Me. The Jewish view of life is that of a gateway to eternity. That’s why the Talmud comments on Ecclesiastes 9:5 by saying that good people are considered living even when dead, while evil people are deemed dead even while they’re still alive.

Life and death don’t exist in the present moment. It’s not the now that matters, but the future eternity.

There are a great many organizations with the ‘J’ in them that are already dead because they chose to exist in the political moment without caring about the Jewish past or the Jewish future.

Featuring Chelsea Handler is their way of telling their donors and members to, “go f___ themselves”.

COLUMN BY

RELATED ARTICLE: Former University of Texas Professor Would Like Israel to Be Bombed “Until the Sand Turns to Glass”

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

The great cathedral of Constantinople is closed to Christians as Turkey has turned it into a mosque

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Finch: All Undone

Editor’s note: The short intro and poem below are authored by Michael Finch.

The great cathedral of Constantinople, Hagia Sophia, has been closed to Christians as Turkey has turned it into a mosque. For almost a century it was a museum and open to all, but no longer. A devastating day for Eastern Orthodox Christians, a sad day for all Christians and for all people of faith in the world.  In retreat we all fall.

All Undone
by Michael Finch

Our world and lives have come undone,
Storms circling, all certainty sailed far on,
What has come to pass, the final call?
Our greatness gone, faded to trumpets song.

I came to rest in a quiet place,
High grass, tall trees, an aching breeze,
Into the glade like folds of peace,
His arms we fall in eternal time.

ABOUT MICHAEL FINCH

Michael Finch is the President and Chief Operating Officer of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His new collection of poetry is Wanderings in Place. Contact him at: michael@horowitzfreedomcenter.org.

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NY: Black Lives Matter Protesters Attack Church

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Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists have been attacking churchgoers at the Grace Baptist Church in Troy, New York since the end of June. Reports surfaced that the group was triggered by the church’s gun giveaway.

While the right-leaning media put the spotlight on BLM with headlines describing “Godless” BLM supporters as having “stormed” the Grace Baptist Church, overwhelming young women and children, the truth is, this is a story of two extremist movements — which, of course, does not excuse the reprehensible and violent behavior of the BLM protesters.

Just for the record, here’s the backstory of the church and its pastor:

First the gun giveaway (which isn’t the totality of this story): At first it might seem bizarre for a church to host a gun giveaway, even though the church had twice before given away AR-15 rifles, once in 2014 and again in 2017 in response to New York’s SAFE Act — a 2013 gun regulation law. (Winners had to successfully pass a background check. The event garnered the attention of local politicians, with at least two supporting it: New York State Assemblyman John McDonald  of the 108th District and Assemblyman Steve McLaughlin who represents the district itself).

This latest gun giveaway was advertised on the church’s website, which also stated that to qualify for the giveaway, one must be present at the church and,

“As always, there will be a slice of ham (the Bible word is swine) outside the front church doors. Everyone entering the building for the service is required to touch the ham before entering the building. Anyone refusing to touch the ham outside the front church doors is not permitted to enter the building. GBC reserves the right to allow any Orthodox or Hasidic Jew to enter without touching the ham.”

We can surmise that the “ham test” is to make sure there aren’t any Muslims entering the church. This is consistent with the the ideology of the leader of the church, Pastor John Koletas, who is known for preaching that “Every Muslim is a Terrorist.” What is seemingly inconsistent with Koletas’ ideology is why he would let Jews in, since he also preaches that “Jews have ruined America” and “Jews Are Cursed”:

Koletas is open about his preachings and, in fact, puts them up on Grace Baptist Church’s Facebook page and its YouTube channel.

Here’s another taste of his preaching:

Remarkably, Pastor Koletas’ flock includes both white and black members and men and women, even though the pastor also preaches that “Blacks Are Cursed” and “Voting Women Ruined America.” He also posted a movie on the church’s Facebook page called “Martin Luther King Jr. Exposed! (Marxist Lucifer King)”

Most news outlets covering this story focused on the Black Lives Matter protesters attacking churchgoers; local New York news focused on the church gun giveaway as a trigger for those protests. Unreported was the fact that other protesters were initially across the street before BLM organizers arrived at the church.

Yet, the bigoted rhetoric of Pastor John Koletas has largely gone unreported. While harassing churchgoers is totally unacceptable, so is being a vile bigot with a pulpit.

For more on Pastor John Koletas, below is a shocking interview where his daughter tells the story of how Koletas came to his extremist views and how his family excused him for them:

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

New Report shows Dramatic Rise in Pedophilia and Sexual Abuse Cases in the Catholic Church

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The Catholic Thing published an article titled Lessons of the Latest Abuse Numbers by  Stephen P. White is executive director of The Catholic Project at The Catholic University of America and a fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Mr. White reports:

Every year, the USCCB publishes a report on how well the Church in the United States is implementing the Dallas Charter (the 2002 document on handling charges of abuse of minors). It includes results from the most recent independent audit of dioceses and eparchies, points out where changes are needed, and makes recommendations for improvement. The report also provides statistics about abuse allegations made during the previous year.

The most recent report – covering July 2018 through June 2019 – appeared last month. It begins with a summary list of the relevant, abuse-related events over that period covered by the report, starting with the suspension from ministry of Theodore McCarrick in June 2018. The list continues for five more pages. To someone who has followed the abuse crisis closely, there is nothing new in that summary. But seeing it all laid out in one place is still a bit staggering.

Unsurprisingly, with clergy abuse so much in the news, with dioceses conducting reviews of old clergy files, and with many jurisdictions opening “look-back windows” on the civil statute of limitations, the number of abuse allegations spiked considerably last year. According to the report, “Between July 1, 2018 and June 30, 2019, 4,434 allegations were reported by 4,220 victims/survivors of child sexual abuse by clergy throughout 194 Catholic dioceses and eparchies.”

Thus, 4,434 previously unreported allegations in one year. To put that in context, it’s more than the number of allegations reported in the four previous years combined. And it easily tops – by more than 1,000 – the previous record for the most new allegations in a single year (3,399) set in 2002.

About one-quarter of these new allegations (1,034) are considered “substantiated,” by which the report means they have been “deemed credible/true based upon the evidence gathered through the investigation.” Most of the other new allegations are either “unable to be proven” (usually because the accused is deceased), still under investigation, or still awaiting investigation. Only 147 allegations out of 4,434 have been determined to be “unsubstantiated.”

READ THE FULL CHARTER FOR THE PROTECTION OF CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE REPORT 

Table 1 on page 38 of the report shows the following in the Catholic Church:

[T]he responding dioceses and parchies reported that between July 1, 2018 and June 30, 2019, they received 2,237 new credible allegations of sexual abuse of a minor by a diocesan or
eparchial priest or deacon.

These allegations were made by 2,237 individuals against 1,391 priests or deacons. Of the 2,237 new allegations reported during this reporting period (July 1, 2018 through June 30,2019), one allegation (less than 1 percent) involved a minor under the age of 18 in 2019. Nearly all of the other allegations were made by adults who are alleging abuse when they were minors.

Table 1. New Credible Allegations Received by Dioceses and Eparchies

Dioceses and Eparchies

The Data Collection Process

Dioceses and eparchies began submitting their data for the 2019 survey in September 2019. CARA and the Secretariat contacted every diocese or eparchy that had not sent in a contact name by late August 2019 to obtain the name of a contact person to complete the survey. CARA and the Secretariat sent multiple reminders by e-mail and telephone to these contact persons, to encourage a high response rate.

By December 2019, all but one of the 197 dioceses and eparchies of the USCCB had responded to the survey, for a response rate of 99 percent. The participation rate among dioceses and eparchies has been nearly unanimous each year of this survey. Beginning in 2004 and 2005 with response rates of 93 and 94 percent, respectively, the response reached 99 percent each year from 2006 to 2014, was 100 percent for 2015 and 2016, and was 99 percent for 2017, 2018, and 2019. A copy of the survey instrument for dioceses and eparchies is included in this report in Appendix I.

Credible Allegations Received by Dioceses and Eparchies

As is shown in Table 1, the responding dioceses and eparchies reported that between July 1, 2018 and June 30, 2019, they received 2,237 new credible allegations of sexual abuse of a minor by a diocesan or eparchial priest or deacon. These allegations were made by 2,237 individuals against 1,391 priests or deacons. Of the 2,237 new allegations reported during this reporting period (July 1, 2018 through June 30, 2019), one allegation (less than 1 percent) involved children under the age of 18 in 2019. Nearly all of the other allegations were made by adults who are alleging abuse when they were minors

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Warner Brothers Film ‘Habit’ portrays Jesus as a Lesbian Woman. Hollywood would never do this to Mohammed!

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There’s a new movie that will soon be coming out called Habit. It stars Paris Jackson, the daughter of the notoriously dysfunctional pop star Michael Jackson. And she’s playing a female, lesbian Jesus.

Vivian N who started petition to Warner Brothers to not distribute “Habit” wrote:

A new blasphemous Hollywood film is predicted to come out soon depicting Jesus as a lesbian woman. The film “Habit” stars Paris Jackson who plays the role of “lesbian Jesus”. Distributors haven’t picked it up as of yet, so let’s please spread awareness and wake people up to the Christianophobic garbage that is spread nowadays, but is somehow accepted and praised by society.

SIGN THE PETITION TO PREVENT THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE FILM “HABIT”

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RELATED ARTICLE: Muslims enraged, demand ban of film glorifying Muhammad, threaten to murder filmmaker, filmmaking is un-Islamic

Minnesota: Hamas-linked CAIR enraged, demands firing of barista who wrote “ISIS” on Muslima’s coffee cup

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The involvement of Hamas-linked CAIR makes this suspicious on its face, as that unsavory organization has trumpeted many hate crimes that turned out to have been faked. But there are two other striking aspects to this story. One is that Hamas-linked CAIR “has yet to identify” the woman to whom this supposedly happened. Why not? Could it be that her name sounds something like “ISIS,” and would thus reveal this to have been an honest mistake on the part of the barista? Anyone who has ever been in a Starbucks knows that many baristas are not exactly intellectual giants, and for many, English is not their first language. Mistakes on names abound at Starbucks outlets all over the country, and most people shrug or laugh them off. Hamas-linked CAIR says: “A supervisor told the Muslim customer that ‘mistakes’ sometimes happen with customers’ names, suggesting that this is not the first incident in which a customer felt targeted or harassed by a Target employee’s conduct when receiving their coffee order.” Or maybe the customer was just noting that his or her name was wrong; not everyone assumes that a mistake means one is being targeted or harassed.

Hamas-linked CAIR has shaken huge sums of money out of corporations with intimidation tactics, claiming “Islamophobia” over honest mistakes. Could that be what is happening here?

“A Muslim woman ordered a frozen drink at Starbucks. The barista wrote ‘ISIS’ on her cup.” Sahan Journal, July 5, 2020 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):

A Muslim woman said that on July 1 she ordered a drink at Starbucks within the Midway Target in St. Paul.

As soon as she started telling the Target Starbucks employee her first name, she said, the barista wrote something on a clear plastic drinking cup.

When the Muslim woman received her drink, she found “ISIS” written on the cup, according to the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization said in a press release that the woman confronted the employee, asking why “ISIS” was written on the cup. ISIS, an acronym for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, is a terrorist group that is active in Iraq and Syria.

“The employee claimed that she had not heard her name correctly,” CAIR-MN stated in the press release. “Later, a supervisor told the Muslim customer that ‘mistakes’ sometimes happen with customers’ names, suggesting that this is not the first incident in which a customer felt targeted or harassed by a Target employee’s conduct when receiving their coffee order.”

CAIR-MN is calling for the firing of the Target Starbucks employee who wrote “ISIS” on the cup….

The woman, whom CAIR-MN has yet to identify, will appear at a press conference with the organization on Monday.

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

The Coming Collapse of the Republic

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“We’re just one election away from full-blown socialism,” a man recently said to me during a short conversation. This sentiment has become increasingly common lately, even, notably, among the previously apolitical. Yet something is overlooked:

In keeping with President Reagan’s observation, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction,” being one election away from tyranny means that not enough people noticed and took action when we were one generation away — or two or three.

Also perhaps overlooked is that being one election away from tyranny now means we’ll be one election away after the next election — whatever happens November 3. The point is that politics being downstream from culture (and, really, from morality, faith and philosophy), this isn’t merely a “moment.” It’s not a fashion. It won’t just pass. And we need be prepared for things to come.

I’ve often cited late Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov, who in 1980s interviews warned of “demoralization” — an undermining of a nation’s morality that makes it ripe for leftist revolution — in America. As a young man in my late teens or early twenties at the time, I didn’t know about Bezmenov (no Internet back then). But I’d recently become more intensely “politically” aware and quickly realized, and began telling people, that the West and the U.S. were in decline and gravitating toward tyranny. Oh, I did realize the republic’s demise was decades away.

Now I suspect it’s years away.

General Michael Flynn, whom, it’s clear, was targeted by the Creep State for being a good man, just warned that if we don’t act, two percent of the people are about to control the other 98 percent. But I’m here to tell you: Long term, voting wont’ save us.

Oh, for sure, get out and vote in November as if your life depends on it (because in a way it does). But as was the case in 2016, a Trump victory and partial GOP control of Congress only amount to a “stay of execution.” The clock is ticking.

Moreover, President Trump’s re-election, like his election, would have to defy the odds. Along with traditional media bias — which a college professor determined aids Democrat candidates by 8 to 10 points every election (an underestimation, I believe) — there’s now social media/Big Tech bias. According to liberal psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein’s research, this factor can shift up to 15 million votes toward one party or the other (not an overestimation, I believe). This is enough to turn any modern election.

Add to this vote fraud and vote harvesting — the latter of which flipped conservative Orange County, Calif., from GOP to Democrat control in 2018 — and left-wing mail-in voting scams, and the picture is clear: Even if Trump wins, the chances of him having two simpatico Houses are slim. And if Trump triumphs but the Democrats hold the House and seize the Senate, there’s a good chance he’ll be deposed.

Really, though, focusing on this, the micro, is to not see the forest for the trees. An excellent high-profile commentator said a while back that this all (the current unrest, intensifying cancel culture, etc.) seemed to happen so suddenly. But only the spark, the George Floyd situation, and the fire were sudden, and something else could have triggered the blaze as well. The kindling, however, and the many-layered sea of morally dead and intellectually dry wood had long been burgeoning.

And the spark only catalyzed the firestorm because we’d reached a point of critical mass.

This is why what we began talking about in the ‘80s, political correctness, has metastasized into “cancel culture.” It’s why two people in two recent days — one a cop, the other an acquaintance — told me what’s plain: They, and everyone else, are afraid to speak their minds, fearing career and reputational destruction. It’s why social media censorship is intensifying by the month. An iron muzzle has descended upon America, and what can’t be spoken against can’t be effectively combated.

As I warned in 2012, there no longer is a culture war. “What is occurring now is a pacification effort.” Its progress is why corporate America, including the now-absorbed Chik-fil-A and NASCAR, has turned decidedly to the dark side (shifted “left”). It’s why prominent people, including Republicans such as Indiana senator Mike Braun, are bowing before terrorist group Black Lives Matter. It’s why mobs are enabled and good people hobbled for defending themselves from the mobs. It’s why we’re seeing a complete cultural collapse — portending a political collapse.

This is partially due to a new “woke” generation having entered the corporate sphere and others of influence. But what did you expect? The apocryphal saying (no, it’s not Lincoln’s) informs, “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” Did you really think the Left could completely control academia for generations and that, somehow, it all would “stay in college”?

Leftists have also controlled entertainment, which could even be more significant. A (perhaps loose) paraphrase of ancient Greek philosopher Plato warns, “When modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state change with them.”

Now, though, we have television and the Internet, whose effects I’ve examined, which dwarf music’s influence. Then there’s the aforementioned media (conventional and social). This culture-shaping media/academia/entertainment triad has long been leftist controlled, the result of the long Gramscian “march through the institutions,” the rotten fruits of all our squandered yesterdays.

Being a culture-shaper also ultimately means, again, being a politics-shaper (and civilization-shaper), and this brings us to conservative rationalization. Even if we could somehow seize control of the media/academia/entertainment axis, sorry, it takes generations to thus reshape society, and the time for that was 60 years ago. That ship has sailed (and sunk).

Then there’s our 1965-born immigration policy, which, I’ve estimated, gives Democrats 300,000 new voters yearly, three million a decade. And when the Democrats assume full control, they’ll legalize the illegal aliens among us and open the floodgates further (goodbye, wall), giving themselves perhaps tens of millions of new voters in short order.

So Democrat presidential sock puppet Joe Biden, echoing the man whose name he couldn’t recall a while back (because echoes are all he has left), not long ago said we had to “fundamentally” change America. But that fundamental change has already occurred. Does the 2020 U.S. even remotely resemble its few-generations-back former self?

So the question isn’t what’s coming, but this: Will you be ready? When the leftists take full political control federally, they’ll mercilessly impose their agenda as leftists always do. If you have no idea what that agenda is, you’re likely not reading this. But do know that it will be effected no-holds-barred.

For not only is there the critical-mass factor, but Machiavellian leftists have convinced their useful idiots, projecting all the way, that conservatives constitute a hateful, “racist,” fascistic, White Supremacist™ threat to civilization. They thus have an ideal pretext for iron-fistedly crushing opponents. When “Nazis” threaten your civilization, after all, you’re faced with desperate times requiring desperate measures, right, comrade?

So how do we proceed? This isn’t a defeatist screed. I’m not saying keep a cyanide capsule handy. But knowing tomorrow’s strategy requires knowing tomorrow’s battlefield. So what can be done when, after this election or the next, the federal government becomes a complete leftist leviathan wholly unmoored from constitutional constraints?

I’ve long advocated nullification — meaning, in this case, the ignoring of unconstitutional federal and judicial dictates — something Thomas Jefferson called the “rightful remedy” for all federal overreach. This should have been embraced long ago (e.g., in response to the Obergefell opinion), but will become more conservative states’ only recourse in the not-too-distant future. Note, too, that we’d just be doing what leftists do with their “sanctuary” cities and defiance of federal drug laws.

In this vein, you can’t win a contest being a “connedservative” who insists on fighting by Queensberry rules while your adversary operates no-holds-barred. Remember that, more and more, we’re living in post-constitutional and post-rule-of-law America. We’re now increasingly subject to the rule of men and, in the coming conflict, it’s only a matter of which men will win.

America is irremediably divided — if a marriage, she would’ve dissolved long ago — and the above resistance would, of course, make that division more official. This brings me to what I believe will be our fate.

After having my ‘80s insights, I concluded that we’d just continue descending into autocracy, as burgeoning laws, regulations and mandates gradually extinguished freedom, placing us in the iron grip of a central government behemoth. But I long ago changed that view: I now believe our country will dissolve, as the USSR did before us.

Assuming this happens, the question is: Will at least one emerging land be a new shining city on a hill?

That’s up to us. And we’d better be ready for things to come, now — because it’s later than you think, and inside-the-box thinking won’t cut it in an outside-the-box future.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Gab or Parler (preferably) or Twitter, or log on to SelwynDuke.com.

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VIDEO: Catholic Priest asks Bishops to Lift Clerical Speech Restrictions

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PAVONE DEMANDS ACTION

A pro-life priest is begging the United States’ bishops to lift their restrictions on clerical, political speech.

On Thursday, Fr. Frank Pavone wrote an open letter to the U.S. Catholic hierarchy, asking them to either act — or permit the clergy to act — in the upcoming election.

Father Pavone told Church Militant that he and his organization, Priests for Life, have faced a consistent internal roadblock with the bishops, calling their lackluster response to Democrats’ abortion policies “embarrassing” and saying they need to “stop being hamstrung by their attorneys and act according to their own judgments.”

Canon 287, §2 states that clerics shouldn’t have an active part in political parties unless allowed by an ecclesiastical authority for the “defense of the rights of the Church or to promote the common good.”

Specifically regarding the partisan divide on abortion, he claims, “We do not have a division simply on policy, but on principle. Our political divide is not simply about prudential judgments, but about ‘the fundamental rights of man’ and ‘the salvation of souls.'”

Pavone has taken fire in the past for his support of President Trump after becoming a member of the Catholics for Trump advisory board and co-chairing the Trump 2020 campaign’s pro-life coalition.

Pro-life priests are currently banned from telling their parishioners to prefer the Republican Party, though it’s the only major party fighting abortion. And without the bishops’ approval, priests like Fr. Pavone will continue to be hindered in their fight for the unborn.

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Gorsuch Does Transgenderism: Notes on the Wreckage

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Hadley Arkes: Let’s remember the constitutional role played by the political branches in the past, liberal and conservative, to narrow and counter court decisions.

n my previous column (“The Ebbing of Truth”), I was bracing for the decision that the Supreme Court was about to hand down in a case on transgenderism (Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC and Bostock v. Clayton County).  Some of us were girding our loins for a shock of seismic force because there had been rumors, now proven so regrettably true, that Justice Neil Gorsuch would defect from the conservative side.

The man who was appointed, with high fanfare, to take the place of Justice Scalia would now make the decisive vote, and write the opinion, in a case that promises to disfigure our laws and our lives, much in the way that Roe v. Wade has worked to remake the culture.

If the schools now begin to instruct the young on the even newer, liberated culture set before them, the youngsters may be given now to wonder just how stable are the differences that really distinguish their mothers from their fathers – or themselves, from their brothers and sisters.  As Michael Hanby, David Crawford and Maggie McCarthy argued, this case may well have brought, as C.S. Lewis had it, “the abolition of man” – and woman.

The case involved Anthony Stephens, who had been working at the Harris Funeral Homes in Michigan for several years before he informed his employers that he wished to “live and work fully as a woman.” In his opinion for the Court, Justice Gorsuch referred to Stephens as “Aimee” and used feminine pronouns at every point.

Gorsuch remarked that “Aimee” had “presented as a male” when “she first got the job.”  From the outset, Gorsuch absorbed the predicate of Stephens’ claim: that in his own understanding, he had in fact become a woman.

Michael Hanby and his colleagues correctly noted that the issue was not the freedom of Stephens to present himself as a woman. To confirm Stephens’ argument was to confirm the obligation of all people around him to respect that claim and treat him as though he were indeed a woman.  If they didn’t affirm that lie, they and their employers could be charged with sustaining a “hostile work environment.”

Some of my friends, reading the case closely, insist that Gorsuch never actually affirmed that Stephens had indeed altered his sex, in the strictest understanding of sex, as the objective differences in the ways our bodies are organized for the function of reproduction.

On the surface, that reading of Gorsuch may look and sound plausible.   But I think we can show, with an even closer reading, that this offers, as the saying goes, a “metaphysic without consequence.” That reading will do nothing to dislodge the judgment in this case, and I think it comes apart the closer we look.

Gorsuch remarked that his judgment did not reach the matter of bathrooms and locker rooms, for those situations were not contained in the case at hand. But Justice Alito quickly pointed out that the holding had been, after all, that it was wrong to turn away from anyone – to withhold a job or a benefit – because of an aversion to a person’s sexual choice of changing genders.  That judgment would presumptively apply to all instances of that discrimination, and indeed the first case has already been pressed on the side of a transgendered high-school girl, seeking admission to a boys’ bathroom.

In the meantime, some of the new, young conservative federal judges may be able to use these cases to resist the sweep of this new principle.  They hope then to induce the Supreme Court to take a sober, second look.

Congress could also make it clear again that the Civil Rights Acts do not bar all-female colleges, and it might deal as well then with female teams and locker rooms.  The Trump Administration has already acted in its own sphere – e.g., in denying access of transgendered women to “women’s shelters.”   It’s time to remind ourselves of the constitutional role played by the political branches in the past, liberal and conservative, to narrow and counter decisions of the courts.

Gorsuch did not have to say anything conclusive on that question of whether Stephens had in fact become a woman.   He could simply use his alchemy of “textualism,” working on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and settle on this limited point: that if Stephens came to regard himself as a woman, that is an understanding that the rest of us are obliged to respect when it comes to “discrimination on the basis of sex.”

But that may also be the key to explain why it will mean nothing in the end to note that Gorsuch had not exactly said that Stephens had changed his biological sex.  My friend Gerard Bradley distilled things in this way:  In the biological sciences, “sex is binary, innate, and immutable.”  And it goes beyond anatomical differences to penetrate to the level of cells.

But “gender identity,” as he says, “denotes a fluid belief system based on cultural constructs, emotion, experiences.”

Gorsuch and the Court can preserve their detachment on the question of whether a man can become a woman only if they simply ignore that inescapable, objective truth of what constitutes “sex.”  To admit that truth is to turn the decision into gibberish.  For if the meaning of “sex” was indeed so inescapably true, no one could be obliged to respect Stephens’ claim to be regarded as a woman.

The deeper irony is that this truth, as a truth, no more comes into sight for the conservative critics of this decision than it does for Gorsuch and his colleagues.  It may be the understanding of “sex” contained in the statutes and in accord with the dictionaries of 1964. But that truth would be there even if the statutes and the dictionaries had said something else.

And conservatives have not counted the ignoring of this truth as the deepest wrong in this decision.  For the melancholy fact is that the appeal to anchoring moral truths has long been ruled out of what has been taken, in our own day,  as “conservative jurisprudence.”

COLUMN BY

Hadley Arkes

Hadley Arkes is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence Emeritus at Amherst College and the Founder/Director of the James Wilson Institute on Natural Rights & the American Founding. His most recent book is Constitutional Illusions & Anchoring Truths: The Touchstone of the Natural Law. Volume II of his audio lectures from The Modern Scholar, First Principles and Natural Law is now available for download.

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