Science 'Pleads the 5th'

From AFA.net (Aug. 10):

First and Second Samuel were originally a single book in the Hebrew Bible, known simply as Sefer Shmuel [Book of Samuel] and remained undivided in the Masoretic manuscript tradition. The book was divided into 2 parts when translated into Greek as part of the Septuagint, probably during the 2^nd century B.C.

Although the human authorship of 2 Samuel remains unknown, its vivid description of Absalom may preserve the testimony of someone familiar with David’s royal court, perhaps a prophet such as Nathan or Gad, or a royal chronicler whose records were later incorporated into the Samuelan tradition.

Second Samuel 14:25 records Absalom’s extraordinary physical beauty:

“But in all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head there was no blemish in him.”

The next chapter reveals how Absalom converted physical appearance, insincere concern, and calculated flattery into personal loyalty. As 2 Samuel 15:6 concludes: “So Absalom stole the hearts of the men of Israel.”

In his classic The Life of David, written in the 1930s, A.W. Pink observes that Israel’s admiration for Absalom revealed the Nation's low spiritual condition. He possessed neither piety, wisdom, nor justice, yet the people were captivated by his handsome appearance. His wickedness was overlooked while his physical beauty was celebrated, feeding the arrogance that eventually brought about his ruin.

Pink saw the same spiritual disorder in his own generation: physical beauty and outward prowess were valued more highly than moral virtue and spiritual grace. He argued that Christendom had fallen into decline because it had become increasingly attracted to whatever appealed to the flesh. Churches wanted full pews and full treasuries; preachers wanted to retain the young; evangelists wanted visible results. Consequently, worldly attractions and high-pressure methods were employed to manufacture the appearance of spiritual success.

Such is seemingly the spiritual state of the Union in 21st-century America: a mile wide and an inch deep.

Which brings us to the ruse of the Gibeonite-like deception surrounding COVID-19 and Anthony Fauci, and the American people’s profound lack of spiritual discernment. The official narrative was advanced by a decadent secular culture and its antagonistic cultural Marxists, deeply entrenched across the spiritual, intellectual, educational, economic, and vocational mountains of influence and power in America.

Yet the Gibeonite deception reveals an even deeper failure. Joshua 9:14 tells of the fatal mistake of trusting physical evidence instead of seeking God’s guidance: “The Israelites sampled their provisions but did not inquire of the Lord.”

The evidence appeared persuasive: the worn garments, patched wineskins, old shoes, and moldy bread. Everything had been carefully arranged to produce the desired conclusion. Israel examined what the Gibeonites presented but failed to inquire of the One who could expose what appearances concealed.

In Gleanings in Joshua, A.W. Pink explains that Satan opposes the people of God in 2 distinct forms: openly, as a roaring lion seeking to devour, and covertly, as a subtle serpent practicing deceit. Pink contends that Scripture and Church history demonstrate that deception is far more dangerous and successful than open persecution. When force cannot exterminate or intimidate the faithful, Satan turns to secret schemes.

Whereas the roaring lion is easily recognized, the subtle serpent seldom is. Open persecution may awaken the Church, but deception enters quietly, clothed in authority, credentialed by experts, amplified by institutions, and presented as unquestionable truth.

That is the great warning running from Joshua through 1 & 2 Samuel and into 21st-century America: God’s people are rarely defeated by superior strength alone. More often, they are defeated when they fail to seek the Lord’s counsel, mistake appearance for character, and surrender spiritual discernment to the prevailing authorities of the age.

The COVID-19 crisis was therefore more than medical or political. It was spiritual, a test whether the American Church could distinguish the voice of truth from the whispers of the guileful serpent.

The postgame accounting must now be lawful, factual, public, and unsparing. Every relevant document should be released. Every financial interest should be disclosed. Every misleading statement should be examined. Every abuse of governmental authority should be exposed.

The actions of Dr. Fauci, NIH officials, pharmaceutical companies, media organizations, government agencies, and communications platforms should be subjected to full-scale, rigorous public examination. Wherever the evidence establishes deliberate deception, concealment, censorship, or unlawful conduct, those responsible must answer for it; not as an act of vengeance, but as a vindication of truth and a warning against its repetition.

Century-old family businesses were bankrupted. Employees and military personnel lost their livelihoods under mask and vaccination mandates. Churches were shuttered, and in places such as California, congregational singing was prohibited. Loved ones died alone in sterile hospital rooms.

These were not abstractions. They were grievous harm inflicted upon real people, real families, churches, and the Nation itself.

Yet the deepest scandal of COVID-19 was not merely that powerful institutions may have misled the American people. It was that a spiritually undiscerning Nation had become so enamored with titles, appearances, credentials, and institutional power that it no longer knew whom - or what - to believe.

Absalom stood before Israel in all his external splendor, captivating and without visible blemish. The Gibeonites stood before Joshua wearing old garments and carrying moldy bread. In both instances, appearance concealed reality.

And therein lies the warning to America: the serpent seldom announces himself with a roar. He comes handsomely dressed, impressively credentialed, officially approved, and carrying precisely the evidence he wants us to see.

The question now is not merely whether America was deceived.

The question is whether the church has recovered enough spiritual discernment to seek the counsel of the Lord, and prevent it from happening again.

Gideons or Rehabs have begun to stand. [source]

Science is about discovering the Truth. When it loses that purpose and becomes politicized and weaponized then trust becomes an issue. I hope and pray that day never comes.

Is DEI biblical?

From Ben Kissling on Christian Post.com (Feb. 2, 2024):

Christian academic institutions have fallen on hard times. I get it. I have three relatives/close friends who until recently worked at such institutions. Two of them were laid off. One because his entire college closed its doors for good. The other left her position in part due to the heavy workload she was being expected to handle.

So, I understand in a very personal way why the leaders of such institutions as the one I currently attend, Biola University, might decide it’s a bad time to pick a fight with a powerful state government over Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

When I was in high school, my church went through a split with my family on the losing side in the sense that we had to leave the church that I’d grown up in, a church whose building I literally helped build with my own two hands. For several years, our elders had decided to use volunteer labor to save money on our new building. My dad volunteered more hours on that thing than anybody but the pastor, and I spent a lot of 12 to sometimes 16-hour Saturdays helping him. Long story short, the elders and the pastor split, and the elders were faced with a choice of either taking the pastor to court over the by-laws or leaving the church. They chose to leave because of a single verse in the Bible which said we are not to take our fellow brothers in Christ to court. And just like that, everything we worked for and donated money towards for years was gone because of one verse.

What lessons do you think that taught me as a young believer? Maybe that our faith is worth sacrificing for. 

Is DEI compatible with Christianity? This is a different question than whether it violates some essential doctrine of the Christian faith. Not taking a brother to court is not an essential doctrine either, but I believe it is the right thing to do. The question is not “Can an individual be a Christian and also adhere to DEI?” The question is whether or not over time, adherence to the assumptions inherent in DEI will undermine Biola as an orthodox Christian institution. I believe the answer to the latter question is yes, and in the long run that is a far more serious question for Biola than the current financial situation.

There are some very basic, intuitive contradictions between DEI and Christianity, specifically Christian morality. Christianity is already inherently anti-racist, and as a Christian institution Biola does not need DEI. But it is worse than that, because DEI is not simply benign either. It is not simply an institutional program to combat racism. DEI is a moral system whose foundations are different than Christian morality, and as a result lead to different moral judgments than Christianity does. Once accepted by a Christian institution, DEI will replace the Christian morality of any institution which accepts its premises, which Biola has already done in March 2021 when President Corey instituted the Division of Diversity and Inclusion.

The key difference between DEI morality and Christian morality is simply that DEI flips the worldly, socio-economic standard upside down, while Christianity replaces it with an entirely different, other-worldly standard. In James 1:9-10, we see a clear example of the relation between Christian morality and socio-economic status: “Now the brother or sister of humble circumstances is to glory in his high position; but the rich person is to glory in his humiliation, because like flowering grass he will pass away” (NASB). At first glance, it might seem like James is reversing the socio-economic standard. After all, he says the poor are in a high position while the rich are in a low position, when presumably judgments according to a socio-economic standard would have the rich high and the poor low. But why would James say each one should glory in their respective positions if one is truly high and the other truly low? If the rich actually were in a low position, then they cannot glory in that position. They should rather be ashamed of their low position and seek a higher one! But that is not what James says for them to do. [read more]

DIE is based on Marxism. Marxism is atheistic. So, the answer is no. Good article.

Marxist teacher who called for 'forceful cultural revolution' lands seat on state legislature

From Fox News.com (Aug. 28, 2023):

A Marxist teacher from Colorado, who called for a "FORCEFUL Cultural Revolution" against "Whiteness," was voted in by Democrats to fill an open state House of Representatives seat Saturday.

Tim Hernández was selected as a state representative for the Denver area on Saturday by a committee of Democrats tasked with filling the vacant seat after its incumbent, Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez, was elected to the Denver City Council.

Hernandez worked at Aurora West Preparatory Academy in the Aurora Public Schools District, according to its website from May. Their staff list has since been scrubbed, and it was unclear if he continues to work in the Colorado district. A sign in his classroom called for "Dismantl[ing] White systems."

Fox News Digital previously found that Hernández went on a Marxist diatribe at a protest organized by unions.

"I want to tear some s---t up it out for you. Are you ready?" Hernández said.

"What I think is happening in our schools, what I think is showing up in my classroom, is a lot of the things that we get into ideological circles up here. We like to compete who knows Marx better, who knows these things better, who's a Leninist. Listen, all right, I'll give you a real take on this s---t. Kids don't care," he said.

It wasn't enough to preach the communist theory, it had to be put into practice, according to Hernández.

"Yes, it's important to know theory. But you have to do some practices, you have to get out into the streets. You have to get into your workplace. You have to go to your families. If we are just sitting, talking in an ideological circle, our kids are still going to schools that are underfunded where they are investing more in their failure than in their success."

"Your [communist] theory will not save you. The revolution… will happen in the hood. It will not be led by who understand Lenin best, it will not be led by the deepest Marxists. The revolution will be led by the people…. And I say all of this because I'm a teacher." 

Fox News Digital also probed into Hernández's public social media, and found the teacher called for a "FORCEFUL cultural revolution," particularly against American "whiteness" and "white supremacy."

He has signaled that he was including lessons on communist theory in his classroom.

For example, to engage young children in his lens of society, Hernandez said they should be shown the movie "A Bug's Life" followed by a lesson on "proletariat revolution," meaning a social revolution in which the working class attempts to overthrow the bourgeoisie.

"A lot of people call me a 'unicorn.' I am not an anomaly. I am a testament to the work we still have to do; this is sacred; this is powerful; this is necessary. I tell my students the truth," he said, according to his notes from a Memphis rally in September 2021 which was reviewed by Fox News. [read more]

Actually, not too shocking. The Left is gradually being taken over by the Marxists. They are losing their soul. And humanity.

The Remaking of America

From AM Greatness.com (Aug. 7, 2023):

We are in the midst of one of the most radical revolutions in American history. It is as far-reaching and dangerous as the turbulent years of the 1850s and 1860s or the 1930s. Every aspect of American life and culture is under assault, including the very processes by which we govern ourselves, and the manner in which we live.

The Revolution began under the Obama administration that sought to divide Americans into oppressed and oppressors, and then substitute race for class victimization. It was empowered by the bicoastal wealth accrued from globalization, and honed during the COVID lockdown, quarantine-fed economic downturn, and the George Floyd riots and their aftermath. The Revolution was boosted by fanatic opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump. And the result is an America that is unrecognizable from what it was a mere decade ago.

Here are 10 upheavals that the Left has successfully wrought.

Free expression. In large swatches of American society—particularly the corporation, the media, the government, the public schools, and the university—it is suddenly dangerous to speak freely. At a DEI workshop, politely object that “whiteness” does not account for all the challenges of “marginalized peoples,” and you will become either ostracized, reprimanded, or perhaps fired.

Suggest to a class that man-made climate change and the state remedies for it, are still under debate—and your career and livelihood are endangered. In 2020, state that Covid lockdowns would do more eventual damage than the virus—and your career was through. Express doubt that there are more than two biological sexes, and if an athlete or high school principal you will be shunned or rendered professionally inert.

The government, in league with social media, censors the news. “Liberal” universities often first require McCarthy-era type “diversity” statements for one to be hired. Commissars review syllabi to spot incorrect or improper speech or insufficient DEI zeal.

The Left now seeks to modify the First Amendment, and its empowerment of “hate speech,” defined as most anything impeding the progressive project. The state and the universities properly issue word lists of approved vocabularies.

The old ACLU or Sen. Church Committee would now probably be deemed rightwing. The methodologies of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover are the preferred models, once they were rebooted to the right cause.

The Weaponization of Justice. Administrations and their efforts to stock the justice department with supporters come and go. But in the last decade the Left has viewed the Department of Justice as a political extension of the party—whose unchecked power must properly be directed to hurt enemies and help friends. No wonder Eric Holder described himself as Obama’s “wingman” and became the first Attorney General to be held in contempt for ignoring a congressional subpoena.

Never in U.S. history have the Department of Justice and sympathetic state and local prosecutors indicted a leading opposition candidate and likely nominee of one of the two major parties, and at the beginning of a presidential campaign. Donald Trump is currently charged with nearly 100 felonies by at least two prosecutors. He likely eventually will be hit with more than- 500 indictments, from four prosecutors, every one of the latter with a long record of either leftwing associations or Democratic service.

The mass murderer Charles Manson faced less legal exposure. No one believes Trump would have been indicted on such counts—most of them involving allegations from years past—were he not running for President.

One count that Donald Trump is not charged with is bribery, or taking money while in office, a crime cited as impeachable in the Constitution and germane to the accusations that Joe Biden and his family raked in millions from foreign governments due to the improper use of his prior Vice Presidency. For what reason did Joe Biden lie that he never discussed his son’s business? Why did Hunter complain to his daughter that Joe demanded half of his own grifting income? Why would a Vice President serially call disreputable American grifters and foreign corrupt oligarchs? Can Joe’s lifestyle ever be reconciled with his reported income?

Given such asymmetry in the application of the laws, conservative or even apolitical Americans are apprehensive that any political prominence will draw the attention of government in effort to either indict or bankrupt them with legal expenses.

The last four FBI Directors have either admitted they lied under oath, or preposterously under oath claimed ignorance or amnesia about events directly under their control. Or they simply stonewalled subpoenas and testimonies about alleged FBI crimes.

The former CIA Director admitted to lying twice under oath. The FBI hired social media corporations to suppress election-cycle news deemed unhelpful to the Left. The agency, along with Democratic operatives, helped hatch the election-cycle conspiracy of the 2015-2016 Russian-Collusion hoax, and the 2020 Russian disinformation laptop hoax. The FBI played a central role in many of the 2024 indictments. In other words, the FBI along with the DOJ, has sought to warp three presidential elections in a row.

On the prompt of a Joe Biden campaign official (and now Secretary of State) and a former interim CIA director, 50 former intelligence officials lied to the electorate that an authentic but incriminating Biden computer was a likely Russian plant—a fact known to be lie but not disclosed as such by the FBI. [read more]

This is the blueprint how the Left is radically transforming America. Another great article by VDH.

Whiz kid offered Google job out of high school but got rejected by 16 colleges —now he’s suing for discrimination

From NY Post.com (Mar. 3, 2025):

Stanley Zhong was a near-perfect college applicant.

Out of the more than 2 million kids who take the SAT annually, he’s one of roughly 2,000 to score a 1590 or higher.

His high school GPA was a 4.42 on a 4.0 scale. He even had an offer in hand to work a PhD-level job at Google before graduating high school.

Stanley, who intended to study computer science, also managed his own startup, e-document signature platform Rabbit-Sign, while still a high schooler.

By anyone’s expectations, the Palo Alto, Calif., teen should have been Harvard- or MIT-bound. Yet Stanley, now 19, was met with disappointment after disappointment in 2023 when college admissions letters started trickling in.

Stanley was rejected by Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell University, Georgia Tech, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, the University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin.

Only the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Maryland — with respective 31% and 44% admissions rates — accepted him. Stanley’s father, Nan Zhong, was astounded.

“I did hear that Asians seem to be facing a higher bar when it comes to college admissions, but I thought maybe it’s an urban legend,” Nan told The Post.

“But then when the rejections rolled in one after another, I was dumbfounded. What started with surprise turned into frustration and then finally it turned into anger.”

With just two offers of admission out of 18 schools, Nan became convinced that his whiz kid must have been discriminated against — and decided to take the schools who rejected his son to court.

“There’s nothing more un-American than this,” Nan said of the alleged discrimination his son faced. “I don’t really think [these schools] give a damn about the damage they’re doing to these kids.”

Asian American students have long gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to affirmative action. The Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in college admissions in June 2023, finding that Asian students were systemically overlooked.

Because Stanley applied for admissions shortly before the ruling, the Zhongs decided to sue colleges located in states that had pre-existing laws prohibiting racial discrimination in admissions.

Affirmative action has been banned at public universities in Stanley’s home state of California since 1996.

So far, the family has filed lawsuits against the University of California system and the University of Washington, alleging the schools “[engaged] in racially discriminatory admissions practices that disadvantage highly qualified Asian-American applicants.”

“[Stanley’s admissions] results stand in stark contrast to his receipt of a full-time job offer from Google for a position requiring a PhD degree or equivalent practical experience,” the lawsuit claims. “Stanley’s experience is emblematic of a broader pattern of racial discrimination against highly qualified Asian-American applicants at UC.” [read more]

Disgraceful. This is racism by these woke universities.

Trump Admin Ends Biden’s Organ-Transplant-By-Race Policy

From The Federalist.com (June 3):

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) ended a Biden administration policy that required racial considerations be made to determine who was eligible to get a kidney transplant.

CMS published a final rule Monday governing the Increasing Organ Transplant Access (IOTA) Model, a mandatory, six-year program that ostensibly sought to “increase access to kidney transplants for patients with end-stage renal disease.” However, the Biden rule, which took effect July 1, 2025, also required participating hospitals to consider race, ethnicity, and “equity” in the decision-making process for allocating organs to patients.

“CMS also wants to reiterate that allocation and transplantation decisions should be made based on objective and measurable medical criteria through the framework set up by the [Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network] OPTN … and should not be made on the basis of race or other criteria not laid out by the goals described in this section of the [Code of Federal Regulations],” the Trump CMS final rule, set to take effect July 1, 2026, states.

The rule came in response to public comment made by America First Legal (AFL) and others arguing that “transplant allocation decisions should remain grounded in objective medical criteria,” the rule states.

As AFL pointed out, the Biden rule encouraged transplant hospitals to “identify disparities among racial and demographic groups, develop Health Equity Plans, conduct resource gap analyses, establish equity-focused goals, and implement targeted interventions designed to preference selected populations.”

The Biden CMS said that “Health Equity Plans,” which were meant to determine areas where hospitals were not meeting its equity goals and then recommend remedial action, were “voluntary,” but AFL stated that they were actually embedded into the IOTA Model.

“The Biden Administration designed the IOTA Model to advance its broader equity agenda within the nation’s organ transplant system,” AFL attorney Megan Redshaw said in a press release. “Life-saving transplant decisions should be guided by medical criteria and clinical urgency — not race. We applaud CMS for removing this framework and restoring a transplant system grounded in medical need and clinical urgency.”

The Biden IOTA Model also sought to fast-track transplants and increase their raw number by paying hospitals to do more, while penalizing hospitals that are not performing to their specifications.

“Tying institutional revenue to transplant counts encourages aggressive procurement and transplant practices in a system already marred by ethical failures, oversight breakdowns, and documented patient-safety concerns,” AFL stated.

The Biden rule was an outgrowth of an executive order — “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government” — that claimed the “unbearable human costs of systemic racism” and forced government programs to have non-white racial preferences for program allocation across numerous initiatives, including in business, federal contracting, housing, health care, and much more.

The Biden administration even went as far as to suggest the necessity of “racial concordance” between health care workers and patients. “Racial concordance” is the theory that health outcomes are worse when the race of the doctor is different than the race of the patient, and that therefore patients should be race-matched with a doctor. It is also an artificial way of shoehorning tacit racial quotas into the medical profession, which was the goal of the Biden administration and many medical schools. [source]

Good!  Glad that Marxist policy was ended. Should have never started to begin with.

A Tax Man with Convictions and Courage

From Lawrence W. Reed on FEE.org (Apr. 15, 2025):

Have you ever heard of someone so principled that he quit his job rather than do something he knew to be wrong?

I admire people of such integrity. We need more of them. Let me tell you about one whose story is especially relevant on April 15, the date the federal government demands we meet our income tax obligations. This man was head of the IRS. His name was T. Coleman Andrews.

Born in Virginia in 1899, Andrews possessed a head for numbers. He loved accounting, an affection which I personally could never understand. Accounting baffled and frustrated me during my undergraduate days; I scraped by with a “C.”  I agree with whoever described an accountant as “someone who solves a problem you did not know you had in a way you don’t understand.”

Andrews was not only good at it, but he also founded several successful accounting firms and worked in high accounting positions for the Commonwealth of Virginia, the US State Department, and the General Accounting Office in Washington.

In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower appointed him Commissioner of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. In an interview while still new in the job, Andrews said that he would insist that every employee engage taxpayers with “a sincere desire to be helpful,” but he promised to come down hard on anybody caught cheating on his taxes.

Andrews moved to simplify complex tax forms. He changed the Bureau’s name to what we know today—the Internal Revenue Service. He adopted numerous measures to improve efficiency, but when Congress overhauled tax law in 1955, he realized how “unreformable” the system was. Isaac William Martin, in his 2013 book titled Rich People’s Movements, quotes Andrews as lamenting that the congressmen who wrote the bill “do not themselves know what they mean.”

Barely two years into his tenure on the inside, Andrews abruptly resigned. His views on the agency and the income tax had evolved. Andrews was one of those rare public servants who “grew in office.” He could no longer hold a position that put him at odds with his conscience. He came to see the IRS and the tax code as oppressive, incomprehensible, and corrupt. Shortly after his departure from the IRS, he issued a statement explaining his position:

Congress went beyond merely enacting an income tax law and repealed Article IV of the Bill of Rights, by empowering the tax collector to do the very things from which that article says we were to be secure. It opened up our homes, our papers and our effects to the prying eyes of government agents and set the stage for searches of our books and vaults and for inquiries into our private affairs whenever the tax men might decide, even though there might not be any justification beyond mere cynical suspicion.

The income tax is bad because it has robbed you and me of the guarantee of privacy and the respect for our property that were given to us in Article IV of the Bill of Rights. This invasion is absolute and complete as far as the amount of tax that can be assessed is concerned. Please remember that under the Sixteenth Amendment, Congress can take 100% of our income anytime it wants to. As a matter of fact, right now it is imposing a tax as high as 91%. This is downright confiscation and cannot be defended on any other grounds.

The income tax is bad because it was conceived in class hatred, is an instrument of vengeance and plays right into the hands of the communists. It employs the vicious communist principle of taking from each according to his accumulation of the fruits of his labor and giving to others according to their needs, regardless of whether those needs are the result of indolence or lack of pride, self-respect, personal dignity or other attributes of men.

The income tax is fulfilling the Marxist prophecy that the surest way to destroy a capitalist society is by steeply graduated taxes on income and heavy levies upon the estates of people when they die.

As matters now stand, if our children make the most of their capabilities and training, they will have to give most of it to the tax collector and so become slaves of the government. People cannot pull themselves up by the bootstraps anymore because the tax collector gets the boots and the straps as well.

Clearly, this was a guy who didn’t allow power or a paycheck to turn either his brain or his spine into jelly. Agree with him or not, you must admit there’s some impressive personal character there.

Andrews continued to speak out against the income tax and the ever-bigger government it was financing. In 1956, he even ran for President of the United States on a third-party ticket—a campaign that, controversially, was built around a states’ rights platform. While some saw it as a principled stance for limited government, others rightly noted its alignment with political figures and movements that defended segregation. He died in 1983 at the age of 84.

The school in my native state of Pennsylvania where I struggled in that accounting class more than a half-century ago is Grove City College. In researching this article, I was proud to learn that in 1963, GCC bestowed an honorary doctorate upon T. Coleman Andrews.

What Andrews had to say may not be much consolation to you this tax season. Perhaps it will be of at least small comfort, however, to know that we once had an IRS Commissioner who saw the harm of the whole business and possessed the courage of his convictions to wash his hands of it. [source]

Wow. If the IRS was corrupt back then, how corrupt is it now? Not very many bureaucrats quit a job because of its corruption. That’s integrity for you.

Civilization Versus the New Nihilists

From AM Greatness.com (Dec. 14, 2023):

Nihilism is the religion of the Left. Anarchy is now at the core of the new Democratic Party.

If the Left wished radically to alter the demography of the U.S., it could have expanded legal immigration through legislation or the courts.

Instead, it simply erased the border and dynamited federal immigration law.

By fiat, nihilists ended the wall, and stopped detaining and deporting illegal aliens altogether.

Or was it worse than that when candidate Joe Biden in September 2019 urged would-be illegal aliens to “surge” the border?

As a result, through laxity and entitlement incentives, eight-million illegal entrants have swarmed the southern border under the Biden administration.

They are swamping border towns, bankrupting big-city budgets, and infuriating even Democratic constituencies.

The same nihilism applies to crime.

In the old days liberals gave light sentences to criminals or reduced bail. But today leftist prosecutors do not even seek bail. They hardly prosecute theft or random assaults.

Criminals are arrested and released the same day. Is the nihilist plan to destroy the entire body of American jurisprudence, and to ensure “equity” in being victimized?

Is the woke idea that all Americans—inclusive of diverse Beverly Hills elites, Hollywood celebrities, or members of Congress alike—must share victim equity, and thus experience first-hand street robbery, car-jacking, smash-and-grab, and home invasion?

The United States can produce annually more natural gas and oil than any nation on earth. It once pioneered nuclear power. It has vast coal reserves and sophisticated hydroelectric plants.

The old idea was to use these unmatched resources to transition gradually to other cleaner fuels such as hydrogen, fusion power, solar, and wind. That way consumers would still enjoy affordable energy. And the United States could remain independent of coercion by the oil-producing Middle East.

But that was not the nihilist way.

Instead, the left deliberately cut back on pipelines, new energy leases, and fracking. It bragged of an upcoming ban on fossil fuels. In drought-stricken, energy-short California, the state is blowing up, not building new dams.

Is the nihilist agenda to punish with bankruptcy the energy-using middle class?

Is the hope that Americans will have to beg the Saudis, Iranians, Venezuelans, and Russians to pump more of the hated goo for our benefit so we would not have to dirty ourselves helping ourselves?

When Joe Biden entered office in January 2021 the U.S. was naturally rebounding from more than a year of Covid-enforced lockdowns.

Overtaxed supply chains were still fragile. Pent-up demand was soaring. Consumers were flush with government cash. Trillions of dollars had been printed and infused into the economy to ward off a feared recession.

All economists advised not to increase the deficit, spike further consumer demand, and expand entitlements.

Instead the Left did just the opposite.

Four-trillion dollars were printed and distributed. In no time, Americans, recovering from Covid, next experienced the worst, but entirely preventable, inflation in 40 years.

Three years later prices on staples remain 30-40 percent higher than when Biden took office. Mortgage rates tripled.

Abroad the nihilism is even more inexplicable and terrifying.

All nations suffer military setbacks. But none in memory have shamefully hightailed out of a theater as we did from Afghanistan.

Few countries could even imagine discarding billions of dollars of weapons and hardware into the hands of the terrorist Taliban, or abandoning a $1 billion new embassy, and a huge, remodeled air base.

Why did the administration simply allow a huge Chinese spy balloon to float and photograph leisurely over the continental U.S.?

Naïve countries might endure two or three attacks on their overseas bases without serious retaliation. But how could the U.S. military permit 135 rocket barrages by Iranian-supplied terrorists on American soldiers without a major and sustained response?

Is the point to humiliate our own troops? To destroy what is left of U.S. deterrence?

Popular culture is especially captive to leftist nihilism.

It is not enough to object to a statue or artwork. Instead, without deliberation or public input, they must be defaced or destroyed, all the better stealthily and by night.

After the massacres of October 7—but well before Israel had even responded to the barbaric invasion—thousands of students swarmed their elite universities cheering on the violence.

And what so exhilarated them?

The nihilist, ghoulish beheading, torture, mutilation, mass rape, dismemberment, and necrophilia of unarmed, civilian Israeli elderly, women, children, and infants.

In sum, we are witnessing an epidemic of leftist nihilism similar to the 16^th-century European mad wave of iconoclastic destruction of religious art.

Or is the better parallel the suicidal insanity that Mao Zedong unleashed during his cultural revolution of the 1960s?

The old politics of right versus left, and Republican opposed to Democrat have now given way to a new existential struggle: Americans must choose between civilization—or its destroyers. [source]

VDH at his best. He has captured and exposed the real Left.

Don’t Say ‘They’: Why Pronouns Matter

From Breakpoint.org (June 6, 2022):

A couple weeks ago, a Title IX investigation was opened for three middle school boys from Wisconsin who used the pronoun she for a biologically female student who wished to go by they. Under the Biden administration, refusing to use misaligned pronouns is considered sex discrimination. Even style guides today encourage the use of they if it is the chosen pronoun of an individual.

One rationale given is that someone really is whatever gender he or she claims, and to not recognize that with pronouns is to contribute to that person’s psychological distress. This is the case even if, as Abigail Shrier describes as being increasingly common, a person’s gender dysphoria is socially conditioned. So, according to our own government, we are now in a zero-sum game: Either use individuals’ chosen pronouns or be blamed for their suicides.

Thankfully, many are beginning to recognize that even using the pronoun they for an individual is deeply problematic, much less fully imbibing all that the new transgender orthodoxy commands. Recently, the Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir wrote an editorial entitled “Don’t Say ‘They.’” In it, Sapir argues that using they and them to refer to an individual is far from harmless and amounts to buying into an ideology that “gender is an oppressive social system.” In other words, using nonbinary plural pronouns and also opposite-sex pronouns says something that is not true about God’s design, the created reality of men and women.

So, what are we to do? Shall we use words that align with reality or shall we refuse to risk the psychological distress of a transgender person?

Two guiding principles can help us here. First, as Aleksander Solzhenitsyn advised, we must “live not by lies.” Second, as Paul advised, “so far as it depends on (us), live peaceably with all.” Living like Christians today requires both, together.

Words matter. Not only do our words reflect reality, and thus misusing words can distort reality, but Scripture is plain that God’s words make up reality. To use words incorrectly is to not only embrace something not true, it is to mislead others away from God. This is not true, nor is it loving. Thus, God says that He hates a “lying tongue.” 

Honoring the second principle, to do our best to “live peaceably with all,” is particularly difficult when the choice is to tell a lie or to be responsible for psychological distress. Philosophy professor Nick Meriwether had a creative response when he found himself between this rock and hard place. When a male student requested that Dr. Meriweather refer to him as a female, using feminine titles and pronouns, he offered to only “refer to this student by a first or last name.”

In response, Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio, charged Dr. Meriweather with creating “a hostile environment,” placed a warning in his employee file, and threatened future punitive action if he refused to comply. So, Dr. Meriwether filed suit, claiming his free speech had been violated. He won. Shawnee State was forced to award him $400,000 and remove the disciplinary statement.

Dr. Meriweather’s story demonstrates that people of conscience ought to not prematurely surrender their convictions, or believe that cultural defeat is inevitable. Even more, it offers a way forward when it comes to pronouns, telling the truth and living at peace.

In English, names do not indicate gender. Pronouns do. Offering to call individuals by their chosen names is a way of respecting them as people without saying something that is not true about them. In a conversation with an individual, the pronoun you is acceptable, since in English it refers to both plural and singular, and to both male and female. In no way, does you deny that biological sex is binary.

On the other hand, speaking in the third person—he, she, or they—when speaking about others is trickier. Some people point out that we use the word they all the time to refer to individuals. However, whenever we say something like, “Somebody left their book,” we don’t know who it is. It’s different if we do know who it is. For example, it would be inaccurate (and strange) to say, “Abigail left their book.”

In other words, there are ways to not say something that is not true. We can avoid using nonbinary or opposite-sex pronouns, and instead use names. And, we can use plural pronouns to talk about a group rather than an individual. Still, as Dr. Meriweather’s situation illustrates, these alternatives will not satisfy everyone. And, when there is no choice but to use third person pronouns, the only way to tell the truth is to use the pronouns that align with biology, not ideology.

To be clear, there is one situation where using someone’s chosen name violates the first principle of telling the truth: If you’ve known a person all of his or her life, and if that name was given for specific purposes. So, for example, to ask moms to use a chosen name over a given name for the child they’ve raised and loved is just cruel.

Some argue that because language changes over time, accepting pronoun changes is just changing with language. This argument assumes that language doesn’t actually refer to reality, but only to other words. But there is a real world, and sexual distinction is part of that real world. To change the language of pronouns severs a link to reality, denies that reality, and disconnects people from what is actually true about their created bodies.

Pronouns may not seem like a fight worth having, but as Chesterton said, “The Church and the heresies always used to fight about words, because they are the only thing worth fighting about.” [source]

Amen. Good principles to live by.

Weimar America

From AM Greatness.com (Dec. 4, 2023):

Something eerie, something creepy, is happening in the world—and now in America as well. The dark mood is brought on by elite universities, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion industry, and massive immigration from illiberal nations and anti-Enlightenment societies.

At Hillcrest High School in Queens, New York, hundreds of students rioted on news that a single teacher in her private social media account had expressed support for Israel. Waving Palestinian flags, and screaming violent threats, the student mob rioted, destroyed school property, sought the teacher out and tried to crash into her classroom—before she was saved from violence by other teachers and an eventual police arrival.

The subtext was that the overwhelmingly minority students (whose school is ranked academically near the bottom among New York City schools) were acculturated to the racist reality that as the “oppressed” they were exempt from any punishment for hunting down their own teacher. As a Jewish (and thus white) “oppressive” supporter of Israel, she was reduced to, in the words an enthusiastic commenter on a Tik Tok video of the riot, a “cracker ass bitch.” And so the student pack tracked her down as if they were hunting an animal. The old Nazi youth gangs tried to kill Jews because they were not considered “white;” our new Nazis hunt them down because they allege that they are. The common denominator between the 1930s and 2023 is an unhinged hatred of Jews.

Hundreds of such incidents are now occurring on a daily basis—as the country is leaving its Weimar phase and heading at warp speed into normalizing Jew-hatred and worse. Instructors singled out Jewish students in classes at UC Davis and Stanford. Pro-Hamas students ripped down posters, swarmed public buildings, and disrupted traffic.

A pro-Israeli demonstrator in Los Angeles was hit on the head and killed by a pro-Palestinian university professor.

Jewish students were trapped in a Cooper Union university library surrounded by pro-Hamas demonstrators. At MIT, Jewish students were warned to keep away from particular areas of the campus deemed dangerous for them.

What would happen to a university president who warned black or Latino students to keep clear of areas where she could not guarantee their safety from other students?

A bankrupt media deserves much of the blame. They daily broadcast Hamas’s suspect casualty figures, as if that terrorist organization has ever been capable of speaking the truth.

The Western news regurgitated “500 dead at a Gaza hospital,” due to a supposedly deliberate Israel bombing. In fact, the hospital parking lot was hit by an errant Islamic Jihad missile intended to kill civilians in Israel.

No matter—few reporters apologized for spreading Hamas-fed misinformation, despite the previous Hamas lies that they never harmed civilians, that tunnels were not beneath hospital grounds, that they did not murder 1,200 Israelis; or their lies that Hamas gunmen do not rape, when they engaged in mass rape on October 7.

The media normalizes Hamas’s atrocities by treating it as if it were an ordinary government, not a murderous terrorist clique that decapitates civilians, takes children as hostages, and mutilates those it slaughters. That the terrorist organization has kidnapped at least ten American citizens and killed perhaps another 31 is lost on the “journalists,” many of them Americans who could care less about the fate of their fellow citizens.

The media fixates on the Israeli response to mass murder, but rarely the mass murder of 1,200 Israeli civilians that prompted the current war. During ceasefires do Israeli terrorists drive into Gaza cities, and shoot and kill innocent civilians—and then brag, as did Hamas recently, that such murdering will only increase? [read more]

Another interesting (and possibly unnerving) essay by VDH.

The Revivalist Manifesto Is a Blueprint for America

From Duggan Flanakin on Townhall.com (July 9, 2022):

Last October when I had lunch in Baton Rouge with Scott McKay, the first of his op-eds championing an American revivalism had just appeared in The American Spectator. There, he had proclaimed that Bush Republicanism was effectively dead, that “conservatism” had been quite unsuccessful at conserving anything, and that Trump was a John the Baptist figure who had set the table for the coming revival.

My appetite for Scott’s vision grew rapidly as he published a follow-up article a month later. Since there was little left of the Founders’ vision left to “conserve,” it was time, he said, to move from passive, defense-minded conservatism to an activist, offense-minded revivalism.

“We need,” he admonished us, “to push back against the incompetence and treason which have encroached upon our liberty and prosperity, and we need a reflowering of the cultural, economic, and political patrimony our forebears gave us.”

Reviving the American spirit, and the American nation, he suggested, should rest on four major tenets. First, too much government makes stealing easier than earning a living, as government power is both corrupt and self-protective. Second, government is representative not of the people but of the interests with access; thus, revivalism should shore up civil society to revitalize long-dormant self-functioning communities.

Third, as we cede more power to government, it corrodes nearly every institution in our culture. Revivalists, therefore, must foster creation of an effusive culture not subject to government control or intervention, one that replaces the greatly decayed educational, entertainment, and informational (media) institutions.

Finally, McKay said, revivalists must stop allowing abuses by corporatist oligarchs (whose power is akin to that of government) and bring forth a new anti-corporate capitalism that can bring prosperity across the board. Stop defending low tax rates for monopolistic corporatists who exercise their wealth and power in support of their government partners. [read more]

A great blueprint for saving the country.

Globalism Is Satanic

From Caldron.com (Aug. 1, 2022):

A significant milestone occurred last Saturday in the ongoing cultural civil war in America.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene declared at a Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Tampa, Florida that not only is she a nationalist, she is a Christian nationalist, and that other conservatives should embrace the label.

The shrieking from the atheist media and the establishment church was shrill and immediate, of course. Newsweek, Time, MSNBC, the New York Times and many others have run hit pieces. The fear was palpable.

They are right to be afraid. The political cult that is cultural Marxism has advanced without adversary for decades through Western societies because its footsoldiers are fanatics and the milquetoast church leaders who should have fought back were too cozy, too careerist and too foolish to take it seriously.

Now we’re murderers.

Champagne communists like Pirate Pete don’t care about gay people or Indigenous people or Muslims or women. They love only themselves. They hate the gospel just as much, and they pretend concern for the ‘marginalized’ and oppressed of the world as a cudgel to wield against God and His people.

They are getting worried because there is an organized resistance forming to the cult of fake love taking over our societies. The movement against identity communism isn’t coming from the church establishment, however; those elite Sadducees who make good money as professional Christians using clever sophistry to compromise the faith and finding willing ears among those who still want a nice church to go to on Sunday but don’t want it to say anything that might offend their gay cousin.

The beginning of the rebellion against this demonic identity cult is coming from us peons in the pews, and it is scaring the purple-haired Marxists no end because they know it has the potential to roll back their century-long march through Western institutions.

So why Christian nationalism, then?

Well, largely because it’s the logical dialectical reaction to Satanic globalism. Jesus commanded us to be wise as serpents (Matthew 10:16), and have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but instead expose them (Ephesians 5:11).  So let’s do that.

Western Marxists are driven by a religious vision for humanity. They have a heaven they long for, but it is not celestial. It’s an earthly paradise that can only be achieved once the original sin of humanity has been redeemed.

No, not the original sin outlined in Genesis. The original sin of colonizing whiteness, of toxic masculinity, of stifling heteronormativity. Just as in the rambling original writings of Marx the labouring proletariat is oppressed by the property-owning bourgeoisie, in Western Marxism the bourgeoisie has been replaced by straight white men and the enslaved proletariat has been replaced by marginalized neurodivergent other-abled gender-non-conforming birthing people with special needs.

We can laugh at how ridiculous it looks when laid out plainly, but these people aren’t messing around. They’ve got a heaven on earth to realize, and you and I are getting in the way with all our plain speech, fact-based thinking and adherence to Scripture.

Western Marxists believe themselves to be the white saviours of all humanity. It is a political project as much as an ideological crusade. The same people who #BelieveAllWomen and #StandWithUkraine also love the United Nations and believe that Western imperialism is justified if it means just one more little girl in Pakistan can sit at the front of the class like her brother.

We Christians have underestimated the danger of ideological utopianism to our peril. The utopian political project has run like a crimson stain through atheist thinking since Thomas More wrote Utopia. Satan plays a long game. Its origins can be traced back even further to Plato’s Republic. The genocidal periods of Islamic expansion could even be included in the body count of utopianism given the earthly focus of the Mohammedan project to expand the Ummah across the world when a caliph is recognized.

Satan has long used the siren song of an earthly utopia to delude men into becoming ideological zealots. It drove forward the French Revolution and the Paris Commune a century later which then inspired Marx and Engels. It powered the firing squads and rape brigades of Bolshevism, the Einsatzgruppen of the Eastern Front and the Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

This beast has claimed hundreds of millions of lives and the church in the West has watched it be incubated in our lecture halls and classrooms since the 60s and done nothing. Now the beast has a new form and it’s strong. Very strong. [read more]

Critical Race Theory for the Rest of Us

From The Public Discourse.com (Nov. 8, 2023):

What is Critical Race Theory?

A movement that was virtually unknown for decades is now, thanks to prominent national activism, a household name. The United States continues to grapple with the legacy of slavery and the persistence of racism. For many, Critical Race Theory (CRT) seems to be the most plausible and coherent framework through which to view the history of racism and its lasting impact on modern life. But as Edward Feser argues in All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory, CRT does more harm than good for racial harmony, an ideal that is better served by such Christian principles as those embodied in the Catholic Church’s social teaching. In Feser’s book, Catholics, other Christians, and even non-Christians will find much to help them confront CRT and the perennial challenges of living in a racially diverse society.

The Christian Response to Racism

The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church states:

The Incarnation of the Son of God [Jesus Christ] shows the equality of all people with regard to dignity: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

Since something of the glory of God shines on the face of every person, the dignity of every person before God is the basis of the dignity of man before other men. Moreover, this is the ultimate foundation of the radical equality and brotherhood among all people, regardless of their race, nation, sex, origin, culture, or class.

Only on such a principled basis, Feser says, could one overcome racism. Biology can refute many racist claims, but hardened racists can always find genetic differences between races to rationalize their prejudice. Defenders of universal human dignity, like the Church, therefore ultimately appeal to the transcendent human nature that we all share in our spiritual soul—which cannot be reduced to genetics.

From each man’s soul—“by which he is most especially in God’s image”—spring his distinctly human capacities to know and love God and other people. It creates a “bond between the human person and the Creator,” the Church says, that grounds his “fundamental inalienable rights, of which God is the guarantor.” God alone, and not one’s parents, creates the soul. It is immortal, and after separating from the body in death it will reunite with the body “at the final Resurrection.” And if he develops his spiritual capacity to love, even the humblest, least educated person—like St. André Bessette—will, after this life, surpass in eternal glory kings and popes who were reckoned among the mighty on earth.

Given the Church’s beliefs, it is not surprising that, when race-based slavery first appeared in the early modern era, Feser notes, “[t]he Church immediately condemned [it] in the harshest terms possible.” In 1537, Pope Paul III bluntly called the opinion that the native peoples of the New World were mere animals the invention of

[t]he enemy of the human race, who . . . in order that he might hinder the preaching of God’s Word of salvation to the people, . . . inspired his satellites . . . to publish abroad that the Indians of the West and the South, and other people of whom We have recent knowledge, should be treated as dumb brutes created for our service, pretending that they are incapable of receiving the catholic faith.

In other words, Feser says, “in this document from five centuries ago, the pope characterizes as nothing less than satanic” the racism that underlay slavery. The same natives, the pope said, “and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ.”

Although many Catholics ignored the pope, the Church’s teaching was clear and emphatic. Over centuries, the teaching was repeated and extended to condemn the enslavement of Filipinos and black Africans. Leo XIII applauded slavery’s abolition in Brazil in 1888. And when Nazism emerged, Pius XI condemned its racist nationalism. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, popes have continued to speak out against the mistreatment of minorities. [read more]

Another article on CRT: Critical Race Theory is the new segregation across schools nationwide

Is Religion the Opium of the People, or the Ladder?

From Breakpoint.org (Sept. 8, 2022):

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature,” wrote Karl Marx, “…the opium of the people.” Decades of often painful historical experience has proven his observation both right and wrong. Believing in God does ease pain and suffering of faithful followers, but he was wrong in thinking that religion, especially Christianity, leaves them with nowhere else to go from there.

A recent article in The Economist put it this way: “Religious belief really does seem to draw the sting of poverty.” Although there is a correlation between poverty and decreased mental health, the article highlighted German sociologist Dr. Jana Berkessel’s recent findings that religion significantly mitigates this effect.

A variety of similar studies confirm this. Regular attendance at religious services consistently correlates with longer life spans, stronger immune systems, and lower blood pressure, as well as decreased anxiety, depression, and suicide. Kids raised in religious households have a lower incidence of drug addiction, delinquency, and incarceration. They’re more likely to graduate high school. In short, the nearly unanimous scientific consensus is that religious belief is good for you.

Of course, Marx’s point was that these benefits only serve to keep people content in their chains and to keep them distracted so much by the next world that they do nothing to change this one. Many critics today take the critique even further. Religion, especially Christianity, has not only been used to pacify people in their oppression but is the very source of it.

Of course, the charge that Christianity has been co-opted, corrupted, and weaponized to justify all kinds of abuse, conquest, and enslavement, is undeniable. At the same time, it’s also undeniable that Christianity has been a global force for the kinds of goods now so pervasive, it’s hard to even imagine the world without them. Many of the rights and principles we consider to be naturally occurring features of the world only came to be by the influence of Christianity.

In the ancient pagan world, violence, rape, infant exposure, and prostitution were rules, not exceptions. Almost immediately, Christianity began to revolutionize pagan ethics, particularly in its view of the poor and the outcast. Roman Emperor Julian famously wrote that when the “impious Galileans support not only their poor, but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.”

To a world with no reason to believe in the equality of all people, Christianity taught that “there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.” This belief was grounded in the Christian view of the human person, which had no parallel in the ancient world and which created an explosion of literacy, social mobility, and human rights that we now take for granted in the modern world.

Christianity’s unique contributions in humanizing the modern world are yet another reason to not simply lump all “religious beliefs” into the one blanket category. All religions are simply not the same, not in substance nor impact.

Economist Robin Grier, for example, conducted a cross-national survey of 63 formerly European colonies. She found that, across the board, Protestant Christianity, in particular, was “positively and significantly correlated with real GDP growth,” and that “the level of Protestantism is significantly related to real per capita income levels.” A National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper found that only certain religious beliefs—notably beliefs about heaven, hell, and an afterlife—are linked with economic growth. In other words, it’s not just about having a “religion,” but about what your religion teaches.

Consider Africa. A recent paper from NBER analyzed educational outcomes among religious children. Though Africa is becoming increasingly religious across the board, the paper found that in many countries, “primary school completion for Christians was more than double that of Muslims or Africans adhering to local religions.” Christian communities far outpace others when it comes to intergenerational educational growth.

Writing in 1843, Karl Marx couldn’t have anticipated how thoroughly science would analyze his claims about religion. He’d likely have been among the modern theorists surprised that the world is becoming more religious, not less. As one writer with The Brookings Institution put it, “While weak state structures collapse and aid agencies switch priorities, one group of actors persists against all odds: religious institutions.”

Of course, this isn’t why anyone should believe the truth claims of Christianity. They should be believed if they are true. At the same time, the fact that Christian belief has been an educational, social, and economic ladder for millions suggests these beliefs ought to be taken seriously. [source]

The Fathers of Communism Were Racist

From The Daily Signal.com (July 13, 2020):

There are plenty of good reasons to abandon the teachings of Karl Marx.

Chief among them is how Marx’s noxious communist ideology has led to suffering and death on a mass scale and has been the ideology at the heart of some of the most brutal and inhumane dictatorships of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Unfortunately, some still try to peddle communism as right in principle if troubled in implementation.

Following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the outbreak of protests and then riots across the country, Black Lives Matter the organization rose quickly alongside black lives matter, the statement.

Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a founder of the Black Lives Matter organization, had no problem defining herself and at least one of the two other founders, Alicia Garza, as “Marxists.” (Opal Tometi is the third founder.)

“The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame,” Khan-Cullors said in a 2015 interview with Real News Network. “Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.”

In addition, there is no question that the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation has a radical and Marxist agenda, if one goes by its official 2015 platform, which calls for the end of the nuclear family, among other extremist suggestions.

It’s interesting to see this organization embrace Marx at a time when so many are calling for a historical reckoning for wide swaths of once-venerated heroes.

We’ve seen an explosion of calls to remove symbols of America’s past in the name of “anti-racism.”

Previous generations and historical figures have been subjected to a ruthless “presentist” standard by which almost all fall victim.

But if George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt must fall, why not the fathers of communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels?

Though Marx and Engels are perhaps most known for their ideas about class conflict and revolution, they both dabbled in theories—increasingly popular at the time—about race and racial hierarchies.

Not only that, but their private correspondence demonstrated an even larger degree of hostility to black-skinned people, as their writings were littered with racial slurs.

In an 1887 letter, Engels wrote that blacks were closer to “the animal kingdom” than the rest of humanity, in a reference to his mixed race son-in-law. [read more]

Niall Ferguson: The Treason of the Intellectuals

From The FP.com (Dec. 10, 2023):

In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs—“The Treason of the Intellectuals”—which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism. By that point, although Benito Mussolini had been in power in Italy for five years, Adolf Hitler was still six years away from power in Germany and 13 years away from victory over France. But already Benda could see the pernicious role that many European academics were playing in politics.

Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence—with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe.

A century later, American academia has gone in the opposite political direction—leftward instead of rightward—but has ended up in much the same place. The question is whether we—unlike the Germans—can do something about it.

For nearly ten years, rather like Benda, I have marveled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals. I have also witnessed the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of “woke” progressives, adherents of “critical race theory,” and apologists for Islamist extremism.

Throughout that period, friends assured me that I was exaggerating. Who could possibly object to more diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus? In any case, weren’t American universities always left-leaning? Were my concerns perhaps just another sign that I was the kind of conservative who had no real future in the academy?

Such arguments fell apart after October 7, as the response of “radical” students and professors to the Hamas atrocities against Israel revealed the realities of contemporary campus life. That hostility to Israeli policy in Gaza regularly slides into antisemitism is now impossible to deny.

I cannot stop thinking of the son of a Jewish friend of mine, who is a graduate student at one of the Ivy League colleges. Just this week, he went to the desk assigned to him to find, carefully placed under his computer keyboard, a note with the words “ZIONIST KIKE!!!” in red and green letters.

Just as disturbing as such incidents—and there are too many to recount—has been the dismally confused responses of university leaders.

Testifying before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce last week, Harvard President Claudine Gay, MIT President Sally Kornbluth, and University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill showed that they had been well-briefed by the lawyers their universities retain for such occasions.

They gave technically correct explanations of how First Amendment rules apply on their campuses—if they did apply. Yes, context matters. If all students did was chant “From the river to the sea,” that speech is protected, so long as there was no threat of violence or “discriminatory harassment.”

But the reason Claudine Gay’s carefully phrased answers on Tuesday infuriated her critics is not that they were technically incorrect, but that they were so clearly at odds with her record—specifically her record as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the years 2018–2022, when Harvard was sliding to the very bottom of the rankings for free speech at colleges.

The killing of George Floyd happened when Gay was dean. Six days after Floyd’s death, she published a statement on the subject that suggests she felt personally threatened by events in distant Minneapolis. Floyd’s death, she wrote, illustrated “the brutality of racist violence in this country” and gave her an “acute sense of vulnerability.” She was “reminded, again, how even our [i.e., black Americans’] most mundane activities, like running. . . can carry inordinate risk. At a moment when all I want to do is gather my teenage son into my arms, I am painfully aware of how little shelter that provides.” In nothing that Gay said last Tuesday did she seem aware that Jewish students might have felt the same way after October 7.

In a memorandum to faculty on August 20, 2020, she wrote: “The calls for racial justice heard on our streets also echo on our campus, as we reckon with our individual and institutional shortcomings and with our Faculty’s shared responsibility to bring truth to bear on the pernicious effects of structural inequality.” Gay continued: “This moment offers a profound opportunity for institutional change that should not and cannot be squandered. . . . I write today to share my personal commitment to this transformational project and the first steps the FAS will take to advance this important agenda in the coming year.”

As the great German sociologist Max Weber rightly argued in his 1917 essay on “Science as a Vocation,” political activism should not be permissible in a lecture hall “because the prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform.” This was also the argument of the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report that universities must “maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.”

This separation between scholarship and politics has been entirely disregarded at the major American universities in recent years. Instead, our most elite schools have embraced the kind of “institutional change” that Gay has championed. Look where it has led us. [read more]

Beware the Leaven of the Transsexuals

From Standing for Freedom.com (June 28, 2023):

What does an ingredient used to bake bread and today’s Alphabet People have in common?

Glad you asked.

Leaven in the Bible is one of those fascinating concepts.

God commands the Israelites, for instance, to use unleavened bread to commemorate their exodus from Egypt, yet later He tells them to consume only leavened bread to celebrate another of the Old Testament feasts, the “Feast of Weeks.”

At first glance, this dietary contrast could seem like an archaic practice that doesn’t have any significance for us right now other than to serve as theological fodder to impress the cute girl setting next to you in the church pews.

But that would be incorrect.

Biblically speaking, “leaven” has less to do about an ingredient that causes bread to rise and more to do with the worldview that influences the way we think and act.

It’s why Jesus instructed His disciples to “watch and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.”  The disciples initially thought that Jesus was talking about food, but soon realized that “he did not tell them to beware of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.”

Leaven, in other words, is a unique way of conveying a system of ideas that impacts the character of a person or society. This system will either give rise to a culture that glorifies Christ in its laws and customs or it will produce the opposite — a way of life that clashes with God’s design for humanity.

As such, we are to choose carefully the “ingredients” — read: ideas — that leaven our surroundings.

For parents, it can be the difference between a child who is vibrantly living in accordance with God’s Word and one who has turned away from the Faith to serve another master.

Which brings us to today’s unhinged transsexual zealotry.

It is a movement determined to get our kids to abandon the Faith and serve that other master.

It is a movement offering its own leaven in the hopes of producing hordes of children who, at best, are confused about basic biological reality and, at worst, are experimented upon like lab rats.

It is a movement, in the end, that has no misgivings about usurping the will of parents and elected leaders to get their way.

The Daily Mail recently published an explosive report chronicling how “dozens of midwestern teachers” conducted a workshop that “traded tips on helping trans students change gender at school without their parents’ knowledge.”

One Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) bureaucrat for the Royal Oaks Schools in Michigan boasted to her colleagues that “we’re working with our record-keeping system so that certain screens can’t be seen by the parents,” particularly if the child identifies as a different gender in the classroom than they do at home. Around 5,000 students, grades kindergarten through 12th grade, are in this school district.

Another “educator” out of Ohio encouraged the group to work “subversively and quietly sometimes to make sure that trans kids have what they need,” adding that the “stakes are very high for trans youth.”

Her example of a “subversive act,” according to the Daily Mail, is for teachers to be “wary of treating ‘reinforced heterosexuality as the norm’” when discussing “men, women, playground crushes, love, and marriage with youngsters[.]”

This strategy session was organized by the Midwest and Plains Equity Assistance Center, which has branches in at least a dozen states and received a cool $8.5 million from the Department of Education for their partnerships with public schools across the country.

One participant in the online gabfest unintentionally captured the worldview dynamics behind gender ideology when she admitted: “I have my own right code of ethics, and that doesn’t always go along with the law.” [read more]

The far-Left (Marxists) use the trans people as a way to destroy the family. The transsexuals are just political weapons to them. And sometimes real weapons.

How hero cops stopped Baltimore drivers seconds before ship smash: ‘The bridge is down!

From NY Post.com (Mar. 26, 2024):

Hero cops managed to block all traffic from Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge with just seconds to spare before a massive container ship slammed into it — then watched in horror as it crumbled into the frigid waters.

“Hold all traffic on the Key Bridge,” one emergency dispatcher told officers around 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, according to police radio traffic.

“There’s a ship approaching that just lost their steering.”

Two cops who happened to be nearby responded, and stationed themselves at either end of the 1.6-mile span — stopping cars from crossing while the 130,000-ton Dali cargo vessel barreled out of control toward the bridge after apparently losing power.

The cops noted that a pothole repair crew was still on the bridge, apparently on a meal break.

But before they could warn them, the Dali collided with a support beam in the middle of the Patapsco River — causing the entire bridge to collapse within seconds — and throwing eight workers into the water.

“The whole bridge just fell down. Start, start! Whoever, everybody! The whole bridge just collapsed,” one frantic cop radioed in.

“The bridge is down!” another officer shouted.

It took about 90 seconds for the bridge to collapse following the initial mayday call from the Dali crew, giving officers only moments to stop the traffic.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore praised the cops for their quick work in making sure no vehicles were traveling on the bridge when it fell.

“They undoubtedly saved numerous lives last night,” Moore said during a press briefing Tuesday.

A review by Maryland transportation officials also confirmed that there were no vehicles driving on the bridge at the time of the incident.

Two of the workers on the bridge were rescued, with one hospitalized and another refusing treatment.

One of the first responders at the scene told The Post the uninjured man, who has yet to be publicly named, was shaken up and just wanted to go home.

“He brushed his clothes off and wanted to see his family,” the first responder said. “He was shaken up a little bit but nothing major. I guess the good lord was on his side.”

Moore said Tuesday afternoon that the search and rescue operation was still underway for the six workers who were missing.

The MV Dali, a Singapore-flagged container ship, had apparently “lost propulsion” as it was leaving the Port of Baltimore after 1:00 a.m., at which time crew members warned officials of a possible collision, according to a report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency obtained by ABC News.

Officials in Singapore confirmed there were 22 Indian crew members and two local harbor pilots aboard the ship. All members of the crew were reported safe.

Officials said the Dali’s lights suddenly went out around 1:25 a.m., with video of the scene showing black smoke billowing from the ship’s chimney. [read more]

God bless those cops! They prevented many more deaths with their quick response. That's how you protect the public.  Nice job!

More on the tragedy:

Ship that obliterated Baltimore bridge was involved in a previous collision; managed by DEI-captive company

Is Math Racist?

From Breakpoint.org (June 29, 2023):

Few subjects seem less political than math. There is little room for subjective judgment because its truths are universal. No matter what you look like or where you’re from or how you feel about it, two plus two will always equal four, and the area of a circle will always be π r². Math is so objective, in fact, some scientists have theorized that prime numbers could offer the basis of communication with supposed intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos.

However, even if aliens know that math has no racial or gender bias, some educators on Earth seem to think otherwise. Even amid plummeting math scores in the latest Nation’s Report Card data, a growing chorus of progressive voices insists that racism and sexism are the biggest problems we face in how to teach math.

A couple years ago, in an article in the Scientific American, Rachel Crowell complained about the racial and gender disparities among those who make a career out of mathematics. She pointed out, for instance, that “fewer than 1 percent of doctorates in math are awarded to African Americans” and that only 29.1 percent “were awarded to women.” More mathematicians, she writes, have been pushing to discuss these issues and “force the field to confront the racism, sexism and other harmful bias it sometimes harbors.”

Though, undoubtedly, examples of identity-group bias in all fields exist, Crowell chose to root her complaint in intangibles: Math doctorates are not “earned” or “received” or “completed;” they are “awarded,” a word choice that not so subtly reinforces her conclusion that something about math education is racist.

Writing at Newsweek, Jason Rantz cited examples of public schools teaching students that math itself, and the way it has always been taught, is oppressive. In Seattle, recently introduced guidelines for K-12 math teachers in several pilot schools claim that “mathematical knowledge has been appropriated by Western culture” and that “math has been and continues to be used to oppress and marginalize people and communities of color.”

In 2021, Oregon’s Department of Education introduced a new toolkit called A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction, created by what Rantz calls “a coalition of left-wing educators.” The toolkit promises “an integrated approach to mathematics that centers Black, Latinx, and [m]ultilingual students in grades 6-8.” It also warns teachers that “[t]he concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false,” and that “[u]pholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuates objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”

This ideological trend in which everything is read through lenses of oppression and victimhood is not isolated in extreme, left-wing enclaves but has become widespread in education. Given the “Critical Theory mood” inflicting Western culture today, it is only likely to grow in the coming years.

One of the many problems with this obsession with racism and oppression in math is that it inevitably leaves students worse at math. In the case of the Seattle pilot schools, for example, performance among black students in the state math exam plummeted after implementing the woke curriculum. Bad ideas with good intentions are still bad ideas. In an effort to empower students, they are instead radically disempowered.

The wonder of mathematics lies precisely in its objectivity, as Melissa Cain Travis describes in Thinking God’s Thoughts, in the miraculous way that math corresponds to and describes the world around us. In her book, Travis chronicles how the beauty and objectivity of numbers led 16th-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler to discover the three laws of planetary motion and to correctly describe the structure of our solar system. Kepler, as much a student of God as he was a scientist, believed that the truths of numbers were eternal, existing eternally in the mind of God and structuring all of reality. Our minds—as beings made in God’s image—are uniquely suited to unlock those mysteries.

Students who are taught that answers to algebra problems depend on the color of their skin and that calculus professors are oppressors are not only not going to unlock the mysteries of the universe, but they will also believe what is not true about who they are and the world in which they live. Woke educators may hope to liberate students. But by depriving them of objective truths they are subjugating them to bad ideas. It’s a tragically ironic and disastrous miscalculation. [source]

I don’t think these 11 famous African American mathematicians thinks math is racist. I also don’t believe the black women in the Hidden Figures movie (a true story) thinks math is racist either.