There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "…truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity–it is simply true and that is the end of it" – Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” – Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
The Bookstore at Southern hosted a panel discussion of Southern Seminary professors on Andrew T. Walker’s newest book Faithful Reason: Natural Law Ethics for God’s Glory and Our Good. The panel, moderated by John D. Wilsey, featured Walker, Dustin Bruce, and President R. Albert Mohler Jr. The panelist discussed the book’s premise that Protestants can hold to a form of natural law without abandoning the authority of Scripture.
Three questions raised during the panel highlight the distinctiveness of a Protestant approach to natural law.
How Can Natural Law Benefit Protestants?
“I discovered that in all the issues I’ve spent my life studying—marriage, transgenderism, abortion, and other sexual ethics—they each crystalize under the issue of natural law,” Walker said. “Certain trends in the mid-twentieth century pushed it to the wayside, but many Protestant scholars are trying to retrieve natural law.”
Natural law discussions often arise when Christians try to persuade unbelievers of the goodness and order of God’s universe, but that’s not why Walker wrote this book.
“From my experience, natural law is rarely convincing to secularists,” Walker said. “I want Christians to understand the coherence and moral intelligibility of our ethics and be able to explain why we hold the beliefs that we do. Anything true in Scripture is something we should be able to discern through reason. We have better reasons for the positions we hold and natural law allows us to have that discussion. Everything is biblically rooted in the creation order and nature bears witness to God the Creator.”
Where Does Natural Law Fit in the History of Christian Thought?
“When I read the Bible, Tertullian, and the other earliest Christians, they all assumed some kind of natural law,” Bruce said. “An understanding of natural law persisted through the Middle Ages, especially in Thomas Aquinas, and through the Post-Reformation era with Reformed Scholasticism, until the twentieth century with Karl Barth.”
The need for reasserting natural law is pressing today because the social fabric of society has untethered itself from previously assumed moral commitments.
“A nation can only withstand so much moral disagreement before collapsing,” Bruce said. “We are quickly losing shared language and ideas from the Constitution and Declaration of Independence that were found in the natural law. This means we are losing the ability and willingness to have intelligible conversations.”
Walker remains optimistic about the durability and stability the natural law offers for the modern world.
“The natural law finds a way,” Walker said. “Man suppresses the truth in unrighteousness, and like a beachball you try to hold underwater, nature will find a way to reassert itself. Ontology wins.”
How Do You Prevent the Loss of Scripture’s Authority?
“We need to distinguish, natural religion, natural theology, and natural law,” Mohler said. “The Protestant concern is that adding ‘natural’ to a term can seem like a system that rivals biblical Christianity.”
Mohler believes Walker’s book is firmly Protestant and does not place undue emphasis on nature at the expense of Scripture.
“Walker’s book focuses on the good of natural law,” Mohler said. “The world needs to hear a very clear Scriptural defense, but natural law declares the catastrophe of modern secular thought and autonomy. That’s a far deeper rebellion of the creation order than just the first chapters of Genesis. Externally, the cosmos declares the existence of God and internally testifies to the glory of the creation of God. When the natural law goes this far and no further, it’s genuinely Protestant.”
Walker affirmed that his defense of natural law depends on Scripture as the supreme authority.
“If you are going to engage in natural law categories you need to know how far you can go,” Walker said. “Nature is a product of grace. We don’t begin from a pure plane of neutrality. My vision for natural law is always grounded in Scripture and the belief that God is not a god that creates in chaos or contradiction. Everyone is participating in the creation order and the natural law is universally binding whether they recognize it or not.”
Rightly understood, natural law can explain how general and special revelation support one another. But sometimes theologians appeal to natural law at the expense of Scripture.
“If natural law is ever an occasion to not invoke Scripture and be embarrassed about Jesus you need to get back to revelation proper,” Walker said. You need special revelation to make sense of general revelation. Both are modes of God’s revelation.”
1 Samuel 8:3 — Wasn’t this the issue with Eli’s kids? Sadly, this happened to Billy Sunday’s children as well. From Rick Grubbs:
Billy Sunday was the most famous and successful evangelist of the early 1900’s. He was a flamboyant professional baseball player who met Christ at Pacific Garden Mission in Chicago. Within a few years he had formed a very successful crusade team which captured media attention all over the country. He is remembered as a colorful preacher who not only led multitudes to Christ, but also led the fight against ending prohibition. Billy Sunday would be considered a success by almost any standard. Yet he lamented, “The great tragedy of my life is that though I have led thousands to Christ, my own sons are not saved.” Indeed his sons mocked their father’s ministry and were drunks with horrible family lives, one of whom ended his life by suicide. It was the practice of the Sundays to leave their children in the care of a nanny while they pursued their ministry. Maybe we should note that fact as we discern what truly is redeeming the time.
1 Samuel 8:5 — As prophesied in Deuteronomy 17:14.
1 Samuel 8:15 — A king that only took 10% of our vineyards and sheep? Our kings take 29%.
1 Samuel 9:16 — Even though Saul would sin greatly, he was still sent by God and anointed.
John 6:41 — Relying on human logic, the people searched for Jesus. Jesus told them that they just wanted another earthly dinner – He came to provide an eternal dinner! They wanted works of God – Jesus told them to just believe on Him. They wanted a sign – He discouraged them by saying they didn’t believe. At the end, they refused to believe He was from heaven because they still relied on human logic.
Psalm 106:37 — Speaking of unbelieving people, this verse tells us where sin leads to: sacrificing one’s sons and daughters to idols. But note Psalm 106:43 – many times did He deliver them! Why? Because of the multitude of His mercies (Psalm 106:45). Let us rejoice with the Psalmist and say “Amen! Hallelujah!” (English: Praise ye the LORD).
Proverbs 14:35 — We’ve seen today what sin does to a people. And the Israelites are not the only people to slaughter their children (e.g. Roe v. Wade).
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Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh. (James 5:8)
The last word in the Canticle of love is, “Make haste, my beloved,” and among the last words of the Apocalypse we read, “The Spirit and the Bride say, Come”; to which the heavenly Bridegroom answers, “Surely I come quickly.” Love longs for the glorious appearing of the Lord and enjoys this sweet promise-“The coming of the Lord draweth nigh.” This stays our minds as to the future. We look out with hope through this window.
This sacred “window of agate” lets in a flood of light upon the present and puts us into fine condition for immediate work or suffering. Are we tired? Then the nearness of our joy whispers patience. Are we growing weary because we do not see the harvest of our seed-sowing? Again this glorious truth cries to us, “Be patient.” Do our multiplied temptations cause us in the least to waver? Then the assurance that before long the Lord will be here preaches to us from this text, “Stablish your hearts.” Be firm, be stable, be constant, “stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord.” Soon will you hear the silver trumpet which announces the coming of your King. Be not in the least afraid. Hold the fort, for He is coming; yea, He may appear this very day.
Jac Marino Chen shares her testimony of how Christ found her and she warns others about the deceptions and lures of the occult, witchcraft, and Freemasonry.
Throughout the twentieth century, it was not uncommon for well-meaning believers in evangelical circles to say things like, “No creed but Christ; no book but the Bible.” There is a seeming plausibility to this statement since Scripture alone is the only infallible rule of faith and practice. However, church history reveals that the Christian church has long perceived a need for creedal doctrinal statements (e.g., the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed, the Athanasian Creed, etc.). During the era of the Protestant Reformation, there was an increasing need for doctrinal clarity on account of the spurious teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. The Westminster Confession of Faith has long been the most well-known and most frequently appealed to Protestant confession of the seventeenth century. There are numerous reasons why believers should commit to a diligent study of the Westminster Confession of Faith. The first is its historical background; the second, its biblical priority; the third, its doctrinal fidelity; and the fourth, its spiritual applicability.
Historical Background
Among the documents produced by the Westminster Assembly are the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Larger Catechism, the Shorter Catechism, and the Directory for the Public Worship of God. These writings were the collaborative work of 131 of the most theologically astute Protestant minsters and professors in the United Kingdom in the seventeenth century–among whom were Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and independent pastors and theologians. The assembly also consisted of thirty combined laymen from the House of Commons and House of Lords, and a Scottish delegation of advisory commissioners. From 1643–1649, the assembly met for a total of 1163 sessions. It was convened at the behest of the English Parliament with the express purpose of setting out a succinct summary of Protestant doctrine. Parliament had tasked the assembly with revising the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England.
Given the ecumenical nature of the members of the assembly, the Westminster Confession of Faith was a cooperative document–the product of men with a variety of theological beliefs coming together to articulate a unified statement of the Christian faith. This makes the Westminster Confession of Faith one of the most theologically mature and uniquely important documents in church history.
Biblical Priority
Certain individuals have charged those who rigorously adhere to the Westminster Confession of Faith with exalting it above the Scripture. However, such accusations are baseless in light of the clear teaching of the opening chapter of the Confession. Edmund Clowney has helpfully explained:
The whole Westminster Confession depends upon its teaching about the Bible itself…Indeed, the recovery of the teaching of the Bible about itself was the key to the liberation brought about by the Protestant Reformation. Does the final authority rest in the church or in the Bible? The first chapter of the Westminster Confession presents its clear witness to the authority of Scripture out of a sense to answer that question biblically.
The divines brought their opening chapter to a close with a statement about their belief in the supremacy of Scripture. They wrote,
The Supreme Judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture. (WCF 1.10)
In 1647, Scripture proofs were added to the divines’ articulation of the doctrines of the Christian faith. This act further revealed their utter commitment to the final and ultimate authority of Scripture.
Doctrinal Fidelity
The members of the Westminster Assembly were not seeking to reinvent the wheel of biblical interpretation. Rather, they were building on the labor of pastors and theologians throughout the history of the church. This is evident from their articulation of Nicene Trinitarianism in their chapter, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” where they stated,
In the unity of the Godhead there be three Persons of one substance, power, and eternity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. The Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son. (WCF 2.3)
It is equally seen in their defense of Chalcedonian Christology in the chapter, “On Christ the Mediator,” where they wrote, “Two whole, perfect, and distinct natures, the Godhead and the manhood, were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion” (WCF 8.2).
While the divines were building upon the central doctrinal formulations to which the church had long adhered they were also correcting and refining existing theological formulations as a result of their polemics with the Roman Catholic Church. One cannot understand the importance of the Westminster Confession of Faith without recognizing the pervasive engagement with and refutation of many of the doctrinal errors of Rome. One very clear example of this aspect of the Confession of Faith is found in the divines’ chapter, “Of the Lord’s Supper.” In the second paragraph of that chapter, they wrote:
In this sacrament Christ is not offered up to His Father, nor any real sacrifice made at all for remission of sins of the quick or dead, but a commemoration of that one offering up of Himself, by Himself, upon the cross, once for all…so that the popish sacrifice of the mass, as they call it, is most abominably injurious to Christ’s one only sacrifice, the alone propitiation for all the sins of the elect. (WCF 29.2)
Insomuch as it preserved and built upon foundational Christian doctrines, while refuting and refining other widely accepted erroneous doctrines, the Westminster Confession of Faith is recognized as one of the most doctrinally careful and precise Creeds and Confessions of the Protestant Reformation.
Spiritual Applicability
The Westminster Confession of Faith is no cold or sterile theological document. Rather, it is full of experiential application of biblical doctrine. One cannot read the divines’ chapters on adoption, sanctification, saving faith, repentance unto life, good works, perseverance, and assurance of grace and salvation (chs. 12–18) without noting the deeply practical and pastoral ways in which the doctrinal truths of Scripture have a bearing on the lives of God’s people. These chapters contain ample examples of experiential Calvinism. While the Confession of Faith is not a devotional document per se, there is a consistent devotional component to its doctrinal expositions.
This article originally appeared here and is used by permission.
Giant hailstones destroy over 15 000 homes in Manipur, India A severe hailstorm struck Manipur, northeast India, on May 5, 2024, resulting in the death of one person and the destruction of over 15 000 homes and other structures. The storm, characterized by heavy rains, giant hail, and strong winds, wreaked havoc across several districts, leaving extensive structural and agricultural damage in its wake.
Oklahoma storm had 3 extraordinary features, including a “wrong-way” tornado Hours after a tornado was documented in Tillman County, Oklahoma, on April 30, meteorologists and weather enthusiasts were enthralled by a severe thunderstorm in the same county because several rare meteorological phenomena, including double tornadoes, a tornado track that looped back on itself and an “anti-cyclonic” tornado, were documented. Because the storm occurred after dark, photos and videos are few and far between, but it left its evidence on the radar.
UK Ministry of Defense Allegedly Hacked by China – Personnel Payroll Information Was Targeted The world is an increasingly conflicted place, with the geopolitical relations between East and West as tensioned as they’ve ever been in decades. In this dangerous panorama, a relentless game of cyber attacks and counterattacks seems to be afoot. At this point, it surfaces that the Chinese regime is now suspected to have hacked the British Ministry of Defense.
Macron’s Ukraine idea could start WWIII Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto has condemned the latest remarks from French President Emmanuel Macron about the option of sending troops to Ukraine, and has warned such a move could ultimately spark an all-out nuclear war.
United Methodist Church Caves and Embraces LGBT Ideology …It’s plain to see how LGBT ideology has infiltrated schools, hospitals, government, and other aspects of everyday life. But most tragically, it’s infiltrated many churches too. Recently, among the slew of churches departing from biblical truth, the United Methodist Church (UMC) made a decision that turns biblical teaching on its head. Although the topic of homosexuality has been debated within the denomination for some time, the UMC publicly embraced LGBT ideology as a church last week.
Did Republicans Just Let In An Anti-Christian Trojan Horse? …Within the language the IHRA provided is this gem: “Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.” Using a cross, a Bible, or biblical passages can under this bill be deemed antisemitic. .
Deception Is The Driving Force Behind The Division Crippling America During the time leading up to America’s Civil War, the United States was torn in two. Today’s division is not like that. This is not a time of breaking in two, but of splintering into thousands. We see the results in churches, families, courts, legislative bodies, political parties, businesses, and social movements. Former allies have now gone to war with one another. It’s as if Satan himself opened a great can of itching powder and cast it on the world. In this case, the itching powder has a name — deception.
IDF attacks Hamas in Rafah The IDF Spokesperson said on Monday night that the military conducted precise, targeted strikes against Hamas terror targets in Eastern Rafah.
An Enormous Chunk Of The U.S. Population Is Either Homeless, Living In Poverty Or Considered To Be Among The Working Poor As the U.S. economy slows down, those at the bottom of the economic food chain are being hit the hardest. Homelessness is surging, the number of Americans living in poverty is rising, and more Americans are considered to be among “the working poor” than ever before. Unfortunately, we are witnessing a historic economic shift right now, and economic conditions are only going to get even more harsh during the months ahead. Needless to say, that is really bad news for all of us.
Can You Guess What It Costs To Live “The American Dream” After 3 Years Of Inflation Under Joe Biden? At this point, the basics of a middle class lifestyle are out of reach for most Americans. Poverty and homelessness are steadily rising, and the economy has become the number one issue during this election cycle. Most of us just want things to go back to the way that they once were, but thanks to the very foolish decisions of our leaders that simply is not possible.
The “bad flu” called covid came and went before the end of 2019 The 2020 covid pandemic was a pandemic of iatrogenic harm instigated by governments and aided by corporate media. Covid, in so far as it is in any way distinct, came and did its seasonal thing in the autumn/winter of 2019, Joel Smalley writes. A few people noticed but it was no cause for alarm over and above a “bad flu.”
Half the US Senate notifies Biden they oppose WHO’s Pandemic Treaty Last Wednesday, 49 members of the US Senate threw down the gauntlet to President Joe Biden over his administration’s secretive plan to make the World Health Organisation (“WHO”) Dictator-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the dictator of US public health. As a press release from Sovereignty Coalition stated, Tedros’ malfeasance contributed to the needless deaths of over 1 million Americans during the covid-19 pandemic.
“The decree is gone forth, and it cannot be recalled, that a more equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth must be established in America.” —John Adams (1776)
Fellow Patriots, on this day in 1945, the Allies accepted the unconditional surrender of the Nazi Germans the day before, marking the official end of World War II in Europe. It is now remembered as Victory in Europe (VE) Day. America paid a high price for victory, losing roughly 183,000 military warriors. Still, that pales in comparison to the total death toll in Europe, which estimates place between 35 million and 60 million. Just days ago, we marked Holocaust Remembrance Day for the more than six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. —Mark Alexander
The more leftists try to include people, the fewer people want to join.
Nate Jackson
So, the Boy Scouts of America wants to be more “inclusive.” That’s what all the mainstream media headlines gushed when the BSA announced yesterday that it will soon change its official name to “Scouting America.” However, that name also seems to fall short of the Left’s utopian goals. Well, a Scout is Helpful, and as an active leader in a local troop with one Eagle Scout son and another not far behind, I have a suggestion for an even more inclusive name that rolls right off the tongue:
The All-Gender, Multi-Race, Any-Identity Beings of Occupied Indigenous Land, or AGMRAIBOIL.
After all, we’re repeatedly and loudly assured that America isn’t very “inclusive,” and the white colonialists initially, er, scouting America only did so to take land from Native Americans. Furthermore, the word “Scouting” implies that there’s a particular curriculum imposed upon troops when beings of unspecified gender ought to be free to pursue their true selves. In fact, “troop” is probably another word that needs to go since that clearly has militaristic overtones. And don’t even get me started on the words “patrol” and “quartermaster.”
I’m mostly kidding, but I’m only mocking the actual feel-good leftist pablum offered up by BSA President and CEO Roger Krone. He said the name change will take effect for the BSA’s 115th birthday on February 8, 2025, and he proudly declared that it will send “a really strong message to everyone in America that they can come to this program, they can bring their authentic self.”
They can come, alright, but they won’t. To repurpose an old Yogi Berra line, nobody goes there anymore; it’s too inclusive.
According to the Associated Press: “After a high point over the last decade of over 2 million members in 2018, the organization currently serves just over 1 million youths, including more than 176,000 girls and young women. Membership peaked in 1972 at almost 5 million.”
To put that in perspective, the BSA experienced an 80% drop in membership over the course of decades when the population of America grew by 60%.
Inclusion!
Of course, that membership slide began well before Scouts went woke. Other factors played a major role, including perhaps primarily that kids simply have many more options for organized activities now than they did 50 years ago. There’s only so much time, energy, and money to dedicate to kids doing things.
More sadly, American families disintegrated over those five decades. There are far fewer dads at home to do Scouting activities with boys than there used to be.
Going woke sure didn’t help.
In 2012, the BSA still had 2.6 million members. The next year, the BSA began allowing openly homosexual Scouts, followed in 2015 by allowing openly homosexual adult leaders. In 2017, the BSA announced it would begin allowing girls and “girls” in separate, gender-specific groups by 2019, at which time it renamed its flagship Boy Scouts program Scouts BSA (i.e., Scouts Boys Scouts of America — real genius branding there from the Department of Redundancy Department).
Over that time, the BSA lost more than half its membership. But sure, blame COVID.
Two things stand out as huge problems. First, while boys who are struggling with homosexuality may find that learning manly skills and having positive adult male influence help them leave that lifestyle, homosexual men are precisely the demographic that causes the most peril. The BSA is working on a $2.46 billion settlement with the more than 90,000 victims of sexual abuse over the years. Yes, the BSA now has a pretty robust Youth Protection Training that is required of any adult who spends time leading or camping, but who do people think committed sexual abuse against boys?
Hint: It’s in the name — homosexual.
Second, allowing girls certainly sounds great to a lot of families who are disappointed with the lackluster Girl Scouts of the USA program, but adding girls totally changes the dynamic for boys. Simply encountering a bunch of girls at summer camp bonfires awakens biological stuff that wouldn’t have otherwise been present. Boys will be boys in other ways.
As an active leader since 2016, the good news is that I can tell you, with the exception of summer camp, these policy changes have had virtually no effect on our troop’s activities. We’re a homeschool-focused all-boy troop led by solid Christian men, and we’re an Eagle-producing machine. We go camping almost every month, we do service projects in our community, and we work on badges routinely. The boys are enthusiastic and learning a ton of great skills that will stick with them for life. That’s why my family has stuck it out.
The bad news is that we’re having the darnedest time recruiting new boys. What once was a vibrant troop and adjoining Cub Scout pack totaling more than 60 boys has dwindled to just seven Boy Scouts. We have no Cub pack at all anymore. Prospective dad after prospective dad says roughly the same thing: The program is excellent, but I want nothing to do with the national organization.
I don’t blame them one bit.
Revenue was a big driver for these decisions, especially as the national organization pays out the wazoo for past crimes. Left-leaning leaders think the best way to increase dues-paying membership is to allow more types of people to join. They foolishly miss or maliciously don’t care that it will drive away others. Indeed, doubling the recruiting pool by adding girls didn’t stop the BSA from losing overall membership.
The real losers are the millions of young men who will miss out entirely on the valuable and manly skills taught through Scouting. Women will lose, too, because, whether they acknowledge it or not, they want men with the values and character Scouts teaches. Put it all together, and “inclusion” suddenly doesn’t feel very inclusive.
Judge postpones Trump classified docs trial, House seeks to prevent illegals skewing electoral power, TikTok sues, and more.
Douglas Andrews, Thomas Gallatin, & Jordan Candler
Cross-Examination
Judge postpones Trump classified docs trial indefinitely: Hoooo-boy, is this one ever making the Trump-hating, lawfare-loving Left lose its, er, excrement. Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, has postponed the former (and perhaps future) president’s classified documents trial, which had been set to begin on May 20, with no new date for its resumption. As Judge Cannon explained, “The Court … determines that finalization of a trial date at this juncture — before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and [Classified Information Procedures Act] issues remaining and forthcoming — would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions before the Court, critical CIPA issues, and additional pretrial and trial preparations necessary to present this case to a jury.” This doesn’t mean Judge Cannon’s courtroom will grind to a halt, though. On the contrary, she’s scheduled a hearing for today, a hearing for May 20, and another for May 22 to hear defendant Waltine Nauta’s motion to dismiss. In addition, as Fox News reports, she’s “scheduled deadlines for reports on May 31, June 10, June 17, and another nonevidentiary hearing on a motion to dismiss on June 21, ‘based on unlawful appointment and funding of special counsel.’” This, of course, is Hatchet Jack Smith’s trial, and it’s the one that legal experts believe most imperils the former president. And that’s why the news is especially delicious for those who think the conduct of lawfare against one’s political opponents is a grave threat to our Republic and those who see two tiers of justice at work in the dueling classified docs cases of Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
House budget puts annual net cost of illegal immigration at $150B: With all the mainstream media’s attention having been drawn to the leftist rabble running roughshod over our nation’s college campuses, we seem to have taken our eye off of what was heretofore the number one issue of American voters: illegal immigration. And, come to think of it, perhaps that’s by design, given that the issue is a political killer for the Democrats. Still, that doesn’t mean things on the border have gotten any better or that our country is somehow binding up the wounds from this unprecedented invasion. Indeed, some of those wounds will be felt in perpetuity. As The Washington Times reports: “Each illegal immigrant costs the U.S. more per year than it spends on the average food stamp recipient or Medicaid beneficiary, according to an analysis by the House Budget Committee. … The total net cost to the U.S. is more than $150 billion a year, with the lion’s share of that going to educate children who are here illegally themselves or whose parents are here without authorization, the Budget Committee says, citing data from the Federation for American Immigration Reform.” Making matters worse, Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington says that the $150 billion figure is a “conservative estimate.” Furthermore, he says the burden will be borne mostly by state and local governments, “who according to the data spend more than $73 billion a year on education, nearly $22 billion on law enforcement and almost $19 billion on medical care.”
House seeks to prevent illegals skewing electoral power: Over 10 million illegal aliens have entered the U.S. since Joe Biden took office. That total is greater than the individual population of 41 states. Given this reality, a bill has been introduced to the House Rules Committee dubbed the Equal Representation Act. This bill, if it became law, would change the Census Bureau’s decennial census questionnaire to include a question regarding citizenship status, which Donald Trump also tried to do. Furthermore, using this data would exclude foreign nationals from being counted for apportionment of congressional representation and the Electoral College. In other words, the legislation would prevent the watering down of American citizens’ electoral representation rights. It would also make the Democrats’ support for open border policy and illegal immigration moot. Their interest is not really about enfranchising illegal aliens. Instead, it’s about building their electoral power by counting illegals. Unfortunately, given the current makeup of Congress, even if this bill were to pass the House, it would go nowhere in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Maybe Democrats will suggest a three-fifths compromise.
Pro-Hamas scum deface NYC WWI monument: With apologies to Dale Carnegie, these people are neither winning friends nor influencing people. We saw the latest example of this on Monday in New York City, where a band of filthy Jew-hating, Hamas-loving leftist rabble vandalized a magnificent World War I memorial. As Fox News reports: “The 107th United States Infantry monument, located along Central Park on the Upper East Side, depicts seven U.S. Army soldiers in the throes of battle in September 1918, as they burst through the Hindenburg Line — the last and strongest of the German army’s defense. On Monday, as anti-Israel protests were underway in the area near Hunter College and the star-studded Met Gala, demonstrators placed pro-Palestinian stickers on the memorial, spray-painted ‘Free Gaza’ and burned the American flag at the site.” That’s right — they burned an American flag. You know, just in case there was any doubt that these dirty hordes don’t just hate the Jewish state but the American one, too. Come to think of it, perhaps they are influencing people — but in all the wrong ways. Not even a Democrat administration could look up such an action and be moved favorably by it. Welp, they’ve defiled a monument to our nation’s long-dead war heroes. I guess the only solution is to put more pressure on Israel. Even the city’s Democrat mayor, Eric Adams, was disgusted by what he saw. As Fox News adds: “Adams, whose uncle died while serving in Vietnam at age 19, offered $5,000 of his own money to catch the vandals. NYPD Crime Stoppers is offering another $10,000 as a reward.”
Feds require SC to give foreign nationals voter registration: Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14019 requires all federal agencies to “promote access to voting,” which in practice has become little other than a get-out-the-vote campaign for Democrats. As Dave Craig, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability, contends, “This is clearly weaponization of the government for a partisan purpose.” According to South Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services, the agency must provide all foreign nationals with voter registration forms when they apply for Medicaid. A spokesman for the Palmetto State’s DHHS, Jeff Leieritz, explained: “SCDHHS does not believe the state Medicaid agency should have a role in voter registration. However, absent the legal authority to make this change, SCDHHS remains required by federal law to provide voter registration application forms with each Medicaid application.” State Representative Adam Morgan observed that the Biden administration’s requirement only confuses foreign nationals who obviously have no right to vote. “The refugee was actually confused,” Morgan stated. “They were like, ‘Am I supposed to fill this out?’ They asked a relative, and the relative is a citizen who said, ‘No, you can’t fill this out. You’re not a citizen.’ [The refugee] said, ‘Why are they giving this out to noncitizens?’ And we were, like, ‘Exactly! That’s insane.’” The fact of the matter is that none of the federal agencies should be involved in any way in an effort to “promote access to voting.” Period.
Colorado requires teachers to lie to students by using “preferred” pronouns: It seems like only yesterday when the Left was using “science” like a truncheon upon the Right, raining blows upon our noggins about climate change and evolution and stem cell research and such things. Times have changed, though, and radically so. And credit goes to the left-leaning New Republic, whose Eric Armstrong way back in 2017 disabused his colleagues of their belief that they’ve taken the scientific high ground. The latest example of this comes from East California Colorado, whose Democrat-run legislature passed, and whose homosexual governor, Jared Polis, signed into law, a statute requiring schoolteachers to use their students’ “preferred” pronouns while at the same time cutting the kids’ parents out of the communication loop. “So,” as RedState’s Ward Clark derisively observes, “if we are to take this law at its face value, if a student comes in and claims that their new chosen name is ‘Beeblebrox Latimore XXabraxus Nightwobbler,’ and that their pronouns are ‘dun’ and ‘dunmore,’ then the teacher must adopt a grave expression and take the young lunatic seriously.” Don’t laugh. The way things are going, Beeblebrox might run for president one day.
TikTok sues: The China-based company TikTok filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government on Tuesday over the recently passed law requiring the social media company to divest all its U.S. assets or be banned. The bipartisan Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act gives TikTok 12 months to divest or be shut down. TikTok asserts that “the Act will force a shutdown of TikTok by January 19, 2025, silencing the 170 million Americans who use the platform to communicate in ways that cannot be replicated elsewhere” and is therefore unconstitutional. TikTok further claims, “The Chinese government has made clear that it would not permit a divestment of the recommendation engine that is a key to the success of TikTok in the United States.” Well, that statement belies the fact that TikTok is indeed controlled by Beijing, which TikTok had previously denied. A member of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Jacob Helberg, noted that point as he rejected TikTok’s claim of the law being unconstitutional. “TikTok’s argument goes against over 100 years of legal precedent,” Helberg said. “It also once again fails to address the central national security question at hand: Bytedance does the bidding of the CCP. TikTok’s ties to the CCP are no longer hypothetical, but are a well-documented pattern corroborated by dozens of company leaks, former executives and whistleblowers.”
Is America in the midst of a mental health crisis? There are some disturbing data from a recent analysis conducted by FAIR Health, which found that the number of mental health diagnoses rose by a whopping 40% from 2019 to 2023. The analysis notes that such diagnoses rose in every age demographic, with those 65 and older showing the highest rise, increasing some 57%. The primary mental health issue was generalized anxiety disorder. The likely culprit for this jump in mental health issues is the COVID pandemic and the subsequent negative social and economic consequences of the government’s response to that event. But there is also another thing to point out: the spreading of radical leftist anti-American and anti-West ideology across the country that promotes victimhood as virtue. Rather than looking at and being thankful for the many blessings we have in this country, the narrative has become almost wholly negative all the time. This can’t be good for one’s mental state when, rather than looking toward the future with high hopes, one is merely waiting for the next shoe to drop.
Headlines
Judge slaps down Trump’s mistrial request in “hush money” case as Stormy Daniels testimony rocks court (RedState)
Georgia Court of Appeals to reconsider Trump’s case for disqualifying Fani Willis (Not the Bee)
Biden tells Americans to “never forget” Hamas atrocities, denounces rising anti-Semitism on campuses (National Review)
Thirty-three arrested as DC police clear George Washington University encampment (Washington Post)
If the school won’t do anything to hold the Jew-hating, anti-America, harassing protesters accountable, future students and employers will.
Emmy Griffin
Columbia University has been front and center for the spate of pro-Hamas protests that have swept across several so-called “higher education” campuses in recent weeks. Columbia’s protests have been the most visible and some of the most vicious. Some students, faculty, and outside activists there have used anti-Jew rhetoric, and some have even assaulted Jewish students or blocked them from attending classes. An especially violent contingent broke into Hamilton Hall and locked authorities out.
These violent protesters have been so disruptive that their fellow students are fearful of attending classes. Furthermore, the university decided to cancel the main graduation ceremony instead of censuring and firing the faculty participating in the protests, expelling the agitating students (who have been given multiple chances to disperse), and evicting the non-school-affiliated activists. The campus has become lawless, and this contingent of fools has not only ruined the end of the year for graduating seniors but has earned Columbia University — along with Harvard, UPenn, and other schools that have allowed this madness to take away from the academics — a blacklisting.
Thirteen federal judges penned a letter to Columbia President Minouche Shafik stating that they will not hire any Columbia students because of the school’s inept handling of the encampments and protests. The judges made several indictments such as, “Columbia has disqualified itself from educating the future leaders of our country.” They accuse the school of not enforcing its own code of conduct (that is unless the protesters are speaking out against conservative culture war issues). Finally, they level this mic drop: “Columbia has instead become an incubator of bigotry.”
The letter includes this ultimatum to Shafik and other university heads who are seeing disruptive pro-Hamas protests: “Universities should also identify students who engage in such conduct so that future employers can avoid hiring them. If not, employers are forced to assume the risk that anyone they hire from Columbia may be one of these disruptive and hateful students.”
Future employers aren’t the only ones telling the Ivy Leagues and other once-respectable higher education institutions that they’ve had enough. Prospective students themselves are now starting to look elsewhere for their college education. Typically, the Ivy Leagues pick the cream of the crop. Now, however, the tables have turned, and the cream of the crop is choosing something else.
Many college-preparing high schoolers are seeing the rise in anti-Semitism in the blue-state-run colleges and universities and, ironically, are looking at Southern schools. Why the South? Well, most of the states there are run by conservative governors who uphold law and order. Graduating high schoolers know they have a better chance of being treated fairly and not being subjected to lunatic activist peers derailing their school year and wasting everyone’s time.
Some wealthy Jewish families are also looking at alternative schools rather than their regular first choice of an Ivy League. As New York Post columnist Rikki Schlott states: “If you want to improve your kid’s chances of getting into an elite university — and you can afford it — it certainly doesn’t hurt to start donating major cash to the school as early as possible. But some wealthy Jewish families who have done just that at schools like Harvard and Columbia, sometimes beginning when their children were in first grade, are now writing it off as a loss.”
In other words, the Ivy Leagues may as well be renamed the Mud Monsters. They are showing their ugly faces. And, it turns out, many Americans aren’t really fans of supporting anti-Jew, Anti-America-fostering universities.
There are some remarkable parallels with the Windy City as the site of this year’s Democratic National Convention, but also some stark contrasts.
Douglas Andrews
“History repeats itself,” said Karl Marx, “first as tragedy, second as farce.” And if the bloody 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was tragic, then this year’s version of the event is indeed setting up to be farcical.
The similarities are hard to ignore. Same city, same political convention, same summer month of August. And in the lead-up to each event, thousands of young people have been disrupting college campuses across the country to protest an unpopular war.
But the difference — the thing that will make this second DNC a pathetic rather than a brutal exercise — will be Chicago’s mayor. Back then, it was Richard J. Daley, the last of the big-city bosses and perhaps the most powerful mayor in American history. This time around, it’ll be Brandon Johnson, the former Chicago Public School teacher.
In American Pharoah, their definitive biography of Daley, authors Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor recall the police crackdown during the ‘68 convention:
The news reports from the convention so far had been grim and bloody, filled with footage of the Chicago police charging into crowds of unarmed anti-war demonstrators, swinging clubs and breaking heads. The elderly, the young, and innocent bystanders of all kinds had been attacked by Daley’s army in blue — some were teargassed, others had their skulls cracked, and still others were shoved through plate-glass windows. … Just the night before, Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut had stood at the podium and decried, to a national television audience, the “Gestapo tactics” being used on the streets of Chicago.
We can practically hear the Ghost of Richard J. Daley now: Boo hoo.
It’s hard to say what we’ll likely see in Brandon Johnson’s Chicago this August because we don’t know whether Israel will have finished its war with Hamas by then. But we do know that this summer’s protesters will be treated by the hapless Mayor Johnson with the same kid gloves that Democrat mayors across the country have afforded these filthy, fake-brave, Jew-hating leftist protesters.
In short, and to borrow from the great Yogi Berra, it’ll be “déjà vu all over again.” And then again, it won’t be.
“The DNC is reportedly taking no chances with the potential risk that pro-Hamas protesters will show up as they continue to harass President Joe Biden for supporting Israel,” writes Townhall’s Sarah Arnold.
The Democrats’ chickens have certainly come home to roost, and it’ll be interesting to see just how willing the party’s poohbahs are to keep their brand from being further sullied by their young and unwashed lefthand flank. When it comes to law and order, though, the Democrats are weakness personified. Indeed, a practically airtight case can be made that the Democrats have become enablers of violence. As our Mark Alexander has written, “In the summer of 2020, then-candidate Joe Biden and his state and local Democrats unleashed a record surge of violence, insisting that our justice system was infested with ‘systemic racism’ and vilifying law enforcement officers while insisting on defunding the police.”
Speaking on behalf of Democrat apologists and blame-casters everywhere, DNC spokesman Matt Hill said in a statement: “Peaceful protest is fundamental to American democracy, and has been a fixture of political conventions for decades. While [wait for it!] Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans stoke political violence, we support the ongoing security coordination at all levels of government to keep our convention safe.” He added, “When the country looks to Chicago this August, the unity and excitement of Democrats will stand in stark contrast to the chaos and extremism stewing in the GOP.”
Yeah, the “unity and excitement” surrounding decrepit Joe Biden’s candidacy is just palpable, isn’t it?
Try as they might, the Democrats are having a devil of a time trying to point folks’ attention away from their own burning house and toward this supposed “chaos and extremism stewing in the GOP.” The only “chaos” we can see is entirely the result of the Democrats’ lawfare strategy against Trump and his supporters.
As the Washington Examiner reports: “The White House has struggled to find an approach to the War in Gaza that would satisfy its traditional pro-Israeli cadres while also placating the younger liberals, who have been vehemently critical of President Joe Biden’s response. The scenes of chaos wrought by the latter have proven to be a major thorn on Biden’s side and threaten to tank his image as a figure of stability in contrast to Trump’s chaos.”
Wait. Since when was Joe Biden ever an “image as a figure of stability” — except to the low-information voters who propelled him to the presidency in the first place?
In this respect, his presidency has been equal parts tragedy and farce.
Democrats raised the minimum wage in California to $20 an hour, which has cost thousands of workers their jobs.
Thomas Gallatin
It’s a harsh reality for thousands of fast-food workers in California who now find themselves without a job, all thanks to the economically detrimental decision of the state’s Democrats to raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour.
UCLA economics professor Lee Ohanian found that roughly 9,500 jobs have been eliminated since the minimum wage was raised — and this is just the beginning. “More fast-food job losses are coming as the new minimum wage took effect earlier this month,” he notes. “This includes losses at Pizza Hut and Round Table Pizza which are in the process of firing nearly 1,300 delivery drivers. El Pollo Loco and Jack in the Box announced that they will speed up the use of robotics, including robots that make salsa and cook fried foods.”
This result was entirely predictable, and Democrat politicians like Governor Gavin Newsom knew it. That is why he sought to carve out a space for restaurants that — no kidding — bake their own bread. That loophole benefits at least one restaurant owned by a company founded by … Gavin Newsom. The PlumpJack Cafe in Olympic Valley recently had a job listing for $16 an hour because it’s exempt from the law.
It’s not just workers who have been hurt by the minimum wage hike. Many small business owners have had to close up shop. One restaurant owner, Marco Capanni, had to do so after 30 years in business. “For a small business like ours, it’s costing us a few thousand dollars to meet this new minimum wage … which is the highest in the country. It’s really tough for us,” Capanni explained.
In the heart of West Hollywood, the impact of the minimum wage increase is stark. A staggering 85 businesses have been forced to shut their doors, a clear testament to the economic upheaval caused by the wage hike.
Often, those workers fortunate enough to keep their jobs have not seen much benefit from the wage hike. Why not? A recent study found that 17% of workers in West Hollywood have had their hours cut.
The trouble is that neither Newsom nor the Democrats who touted this wage increase will reconsider. For them, the blame for workers losing their jobs or having their hours cut goes to those “greedy” business owners, not the unchanging basics of economics. Legislating that something (labor) should cost a certain (higher) amount does not mean that it’s worth that certain amount or that a business can afford to pay it.
California’s minimum wage increase may also be partly to blame for the lower-than-expected national jobs numbers for April, which came in at 175,000 added, well below the anticipated 240,000. Furthermore, the headline unemployment rate also rose to 3.9%.
All of this is bad news for Joe Biden, as the lousy economy remains the number one issue for voters. Try as he and his handlers might, the people aren’t buying Biden’s economic policies or dishonest attempts to reframe them in attractive language.
Unfortunately, Californians are learning the hard way how bad economic policy decisions make life that much more difficult. Will it motivate them to stop voting Democrat? Maybe some, but many conservatives are simply leaving the state for greener pastures.
Are the pro-Hamas protests roiling college campuses an exhibition of naïve student activism or much more?
Jack DeVine
It’s bewildering — what seems to be a tidal wave of passionate activism infecting 200 or more college campuses nationwide, all on precisely the wrong side of a very important world issue.
Wrapped in feel-good slogans like “Free Palestine” and “From the river to the sea,” the student activists and their compatriots are condemning the military actions taken by Israel in reaction to the barbaric Hamas attack on Israeli civilians eight months ago, and demanding the termination of public and private financial support to Israel.
In effect, thousands of young American university students — supposedly our best and brightest — are wholeheartedly preaching to the world a message that is implicitly pro-terrorist and anti-Semitic.
What gives? How can they be so wrong? And what do we do about it? My thoughts:
1.) The issue is really not that complicated. Yes, the perpetual unrest in the Middle East continues to defy resolution, and the plight of the stateless Palestinians remains unresolved. But there is nothing at all unclear about the Hamas actions of last October 7 — a preplanned, large-scale orgy of rape, torture, and murder of 1,200 people, and the abduction of hundreds more (including five American citizens) — nor is there anything unclear about Israel’s resolve to eliminate that menace once and for all.
A brief summary of undebatable facts:
Hamas is an Islamic resistance organization unabashedly dedicated to the total extinction of Israel. Hamas has controlled the Palestinian enclave in Gaza, bordering Israel, since 2007.
The October 7 assault was only the latest in repeated hostile actions by Hamas, including suicide bombings and indiscriminate rocket attacks. Negotiated agreements to cease hostilities are meaningless to Hamas — one such agreement was in place on October 7.
Palestinians residing in Gaza, while generally supportive of Hamas, are pawns in the Israel-Hamas war. Hamas’s primary defensive tactic is to use them as human shields, embedding their military forces and operational controls in densely populated areas, thus guaranteeing that the inevitable Israeli counterattacks will incur substantial noncombatant human casualties.
Faced with an adversary actively committed to its annihilation and oblivious to human consequences, the Israelis have no choice: They must eliminate the ongoing threat to their nation’s survival. They deserve our respect and full support.
2.) The protests sweeping U.S. college campuses may look like a spontaneous outpouring of concern by idealistic college students. But look again.
Notice that the protests came to life nearly simultaneously and that they are remarkably similar in style and choreography — tent encampments erected on campuses, protesters’ faces obscured by masks, signs with common messaging, occupation and /or defacing of campus facilities, intimidation of Jewish students — all in direct noncompliance with university regulations. The wave of on-campus protesting coincided with the peak period of term exams and graduation activities — perfect timing for maximum disruption of campus life and full-bore national attention.
While student enthusiasm for the current movement is surely authentic, it seems clear that college campuses are the stage and college students are the performers — and behind the scenes, there are producers and directors who have a much broader agenda in mind. We don’t yet know the extent and the specifics, but it is widely and reliably reported that George Soros and other wealthy supporters of left-wing causes are contributing substantially to the campus uprisings.
3.) Keep in mind the long and checkered history of mass protest in the U.S. The right to protest is a central feature of American culture and tradition, properly protected by our Constitution. Sometimes, it’s constructive — and sometimes it’s not.
At times, protest has paved the way to profound, positive change — most notably, our collective recognition and commitment to civil rights. However, in other cases, protest movements have precipitated ill-conceived and shortsighted reactions, such as the BLM/George Floyd defund-the-police initiatives. Some have long-term consequences. For example, 1980s anti-nuclear power activism is a significant contributing factor to today’s serious shortage of the safe and clean electricity that nuclear power can produce.
Keep in mind as well the slippery slope between meaningful protest and violent riots. We’ve seen again and again that protests described as “mainly peaceful” sometimes devolve into violent assaults on police, property damage, arson, looting, and the like. It’s happening now.
4.) U.S. policy on the Israel-Hamas war is woefully ambiguous and internally inconsistent. President Joe Biden expresses full support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s resolve to destroy Hamas but simultaneously objects to Israeli military actions necessary to get the job done. Biden endorses efforts to achieve a negotiated ceasefire to enable the return of hostages (any who may still be alive), but that noble objective effectively rewards Hamas’s actions in abducting them. How is that going to work out?
So, what now? As a protest of one, I’d argue for starters:
Put in place an unambiguous U.S. policy of support to Israel. We must lead, not follow, and keep the partisan politics home.
University chancellors must recalibrate their students on both their rights and responsibilities under the First Amendment and upgrade and enforce campus policies, rules, and regulations accordingly. They must not permit student activism to interfere with their central mission of student education.
Our U.S. security professionals must pay attention to yet another reminder of the challenges we face here at home. For four years, they’ve warned of the imminent threat posed by domestic right-wing extremists while largely ignoring that posed by extremists on the other side and by unknown forces among the millions of unvetted illegal immigrants now here. And don’t lose sight of the terrorist organizations like Hamas that hate us just as fiercely as they hate Israel.
It’s a dangerous world out there. Take heed, America!
“Right now we have, you know, young black kids growing up in the Bronx who don’t even know what the word ‘computer’ is.” —New York Governor Kathy Hochul (“Democrats are always trying to prove they aren’t racist by talking about how dumb and incapable minorities are.” —Seth Dillon)
Lack of Self-Awareness Award
“We must fight to make sure that we remain a democracy, not an authoritarian society.” —Senator Bernie Sanders (VT)
Stranger Than Fiction
“Can you imagine a kid, two years old, saying: ‘Mom, don’t take me across the Rio Grande. It’s against the law.’ Give me a break. These have been model citizens.” —Joe Biden
The BIG Lie
“Twenty-eight out of every 100 students in school speak Spanish — 28!” —Joe Biden
Baghdad Bob
“Under this president’s leadership … violent crime is at a nearly 50-year low.” —White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre
Braying Jenny
“Maybe Donald Trump will go away. Maybe he’ll go to jail. Maybe he will die. Not to be too morbid, but maybe — I mean, he’s not a young man.” —MSNBC’s Jen Psaki
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
“To strengthen America’s economy, we are also helping more people buy a home.” —Kamala Harris
For the Record
“In all the years of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders never lowered the American flag and raised the flag of black power. They embraced America and wanted all the promises of America to be applied equally to them. This movement on our college campuses today is full of hatred for the civilization that these students are blessed to reside in.” —Gary Bauer
“The protests that are cropping up around us are not ‘just like’ Vietnam. They are much closer to the BLM protest/riots that engulfed our country a few years ago. The point of those marches seemed to be grievance and hatred of ‘the other,’ not a true attempt at any social reckoning.” —Christine Flowers
Political Futures
“The protests and riots following the death of George Floyd didn’t make voters flock to Trump in the name of rallying law and order. Instead, the unrest simply made the Republican incumbent look weak, a leader who’d lost control of the situation. Now it’s Biden’s turn to appear powerless to unite the country — or even his own side.” —Daniel McCarthy
“The problem for Biden is that many of the attacks on Trump — especially those based on his legal prosecutions — feel besides the point compared to the bigger questions in the race. Are more people going to care that Trump has been convicted of felonious bookkeeping related to a payment to a porn star eight years ago or that they think he can do a better job handling inflation?” —Rich Lowry
“The most direct way for Joe Biden to improve his chances in November would be to become a good president — although it’s unfair to place such unrealistic expectations on him at this juncture in his presidency and career.” —Rich Lowry
The ink was barely dry on President Biden’s signature transferring another $61 billion to the black hole called Ukraine, when the mainstream media broke the news that this was not the parting shot in a failed US policy.The elites have no intention of shutting down this gravy train, which transports wealth from the middle and working class to the wealthy and connected class.
Reuters wrote right after the aid bill was passed that, “Ukraine’s $61 billion lifeline is not enough.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell went on the Sunday shows after the bill was passed to say that $61 billion is “not a whole lot of money for us…” Well, that’s easy for him to say – after all it’s always easier to spend someone else’s money!
Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, was far from grateful for the $170 billion we have shipped thus far to his country.In an interview with Foreign Policy magazine as the aid package was passed, Kuleba had the nerve to criticize the US for not producing weapons fast enough. “If you cannot produce enough interceptors to help Ukraine win the war against the country that wants to destroy the world order, then how are you going to win in the war against perhaps an enemy who is stronger than Russia?”
How’s that for a “thank you”?
It may be understandable why theUkrainians
are frustrated. Most of this money is not going to help them fight Russia. US military aid to Ukraine has left our own stockpiles of weapons depleted, so the money is going to create new production lines to replace weapons already sent to Ukraine. It’s all about the US weapons industry. President Biden admitted as much when he said, “we are helping Ukraine while at the same time investing in our own industrial base.”
This is why Washington Is desperate to make sure that if Donald Trump returns to the White House, the “Ukraine” gravy train cannot be shut down by his – or future – administrations. Last week news broke that the Ukrainian government was in negotiations with the Biden Administration to sign a ten-year security agreement that would lock in US funding for Ukraine for the next two and a half US Administrations. That would unconstitutionally tie future presidents’ hands when it comes to foreign policy and would leave Americans on the hook for untold billions more dollars taken from them and sent to the weapons industry and to a corrupt foreign government.
The US weapons industry and its cheerleaders in Washington DC are determined to keep Ukraine money flowing…until they can figure out a way to gin up a war with China after losing the current war with Russia. That, of course, depends on whether there is anything left of us when the smoke clears.
When President Biden signed the $95 billion bill to keep wars going in Ukraine and Gaza and to provoke a future war with China, he called it “a good day for world peace.” Yes, and “War is peace.” Debt is good. Freedom is slavery. We are living in a post-truth societywhere billions spent on pointless wars are “not a whole lot of money.” But the piper will be paid and the debt will be cleared.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu says Israel has taken “an important step on the way to destroying the remaining military capabilities of Hamas,” while the Biden Administration says it’s closely monitoring the invasion of Rafah, which it opposes; President Biden says “we will not forget” the Hamas attacks on October 7th, but critics blast the Administration for withholding powerful bombs from Israel out of concern they would be used in Rafah, while still pushing for a ceasefire; Chris Mitchell talks about if Israel believes a deal is possible, how much Israel can depend on the White House, Israel’s military successes against Hamas, the fighting against Hezbollah, and more; Israeli parents of loved ones lost during the fighting in Gaza took to the streets before the invasion of Rafah, saying an assault was necessary to finish off Hamas; our Studio 5 look at the new movie “Unsung Hero,” about an Australian family who came to the US and took a leap of faith on their kids’ musical talent (among them- King & Country, and Rebecca St James); and hundreds of college students came to the Lord and were baptized at a recent worship event at the University of Tennessee.
YouTube has taken down a speech by conservative commentator Eva Vlaardingerbroek from the Netherlands in which she warned about a “great replacement” of European peoples.
The Gateway Pundit previously posted her historic speech last month.
Vlaardingerbroek posted about the censorship on the X platform.
“Of course YouTube deleted my speech,” she wrote. “In the meantime we’re nearing 50 Million views here on X. Man, I love this app. Thanks for buying it, Elon Musk.”
According to YouTube, the speech violated their “hate speech” policy by “inciting hatred of groups because they belong to a protected group.”
The viral speech, which she delivered at CPAC Hungary in Budapest, discussed the invasion of Europe’s borders by mass immigration that she likened to a form of “great replacement.”
“I spoke the forbidden truth: The Great Replacement is no longer a theory – it’s reality,” she said at the time. “White Europeans are being replaced in their own countries at an ever-accelerating rate, and it will mean the end of our civilization if we don’t turn things around.”
The speech caught the attention of X owner Elon Musk, who argued that the issue is less about mass immigration and more about low birth rates.
“The problem with “Great Replacement Theory” is that it fails to address the foundational issue of low birth rates. Record low birth rates are leading to population collapse in Europe and even faster population collapse in most of Asia. Immigration is low in Asia, so there is no “replacement” going on, the countries are simply shrinking away.”
The problem with “Great Replacement Theory” is that it fails to address the foundational issue of low birth rates.
Record low birth rates are leading to population collapse in Europe and even faster population collapse in most of Asia. Immigration is low in Asia, so there is no… https://t.co/ddGM5R6vWh
“If this doesn’t turn around, then any countries on Earth with low birth rates will become empty of people and fall into ruin, like the remains we see of the many long dead civilizations,” he added.
Fortunately for Vlaardingerbroek, the emergence of free speech-centered platforms such as X and Rumble means that YouTube’s censorship is no longer the end of its circulation. Long may that continue.
Published May 6, 2024Freedom Uncoupled from Truth Leads to Bondage
Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from an address delivered at the 2024 Providence Faith and Life Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona.
To walk wisely and effectively in the world, a Christian must understand the world – the world as it is, not as we imagine it to be. We are not living in the Christian world of our parents’ youth. Ours is a “post-Christian” world.
At the height of Beatlemania in 1966, John Lennon got himself in a mess of trouble for remarking publicly that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus.” The English-speaking world at the time was far from a holy city on a hill, if it ever has been. But, in America, the fact that he had to publicly apologize and explain himself indicates that we were a functionally Christian society. The public pieties were Christian pieties. Today, the expectation of having to abase oneself for a blasphemous remark, even if only from business prudence, is inconceivable. What is fully expected, rather, is that your social or celebrity cred will increase by violating Christian norms, and that you would get into that level of trouble only by offending the current pieties of liberal progressivism, or wokeness. This is the post-Christian world.
Our transition from a predominantly Christian world to post-Christian was not a sudden cultural shift, traceable to “the sixties” or the Clinton presidency or any such recent turn in the road. Nor can it be reversed by the right candidate and outcome of a presidential election. It has not been as superficial as the co-opting of certain elites by a generation of college radicals and a few corrupt financiers. It is a development in Western civilization as a whole, rooted deep in the beginnings of modernity, and, like the Christian view, it is comprehensive in its scope, reaching to our views of God, man, and the universe.
The post-Christian world introduced a different metaphysics – an empty sky; a different hope – the perfection of our earthly life; and a different morality – personal autonomy. The result has been predictably, catastrophically, and unsustainably inhuman, explaining much of what appears to a traditional Christian and to common sense as a world-gone-mad.
As such, the post-Christian world is in existential crisis. It is tottering and scared. But a way of life will not crumble and vanish without something organized and confident to replace it. The wise Christian must therefore ask: what is the post-Christian, how is it still dangerous, and what will revitalize Christian civilization?
GOP conference chair Rep. Elise Stefanik joins ‘Fox & Friends’ to discuss the Biden administration’s move to pause a weapons shipment to Israel. #foxnews Sub…
Today’s 20-min top headline news brief from NEWSMAX includes:
[2:17] -Mainstream media ignores NY Gov. Kathy Hochul’s tone deaf racial gaffe.
[4:22] -Newsmax host Carl Higbie: “Democrats think minorities are stupid.” [Carl Higbie Frontline]
[7:24] -Palm Beach prosecutor Dave Aronberg: “They should start with what they’re going to do to protect Jewish students on college campus.” [Newsline]
[10:12] -Conservative black influencer Joel Patrick: “I honestly don’t care if Donald Trump is racist, the country has much bigger issues.” [Carl Higbie Frontline]
[11:57] -Tulsi Gabbard says she would be honored to serve as Trump’s Vice President. [The Record with Greta Van Susteren]
[15:47] -Robert F Kennedy Jr. challenges Donald Trump to a debate. [Eric Bolling The Balance]
Several months ago WORLD magazine recognized as its 2023 book of the year J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism, which is not a new book but a 100-year old reprint.
The book contrasts orthodox Christianity with religious liberalism and argues that the two are not different interpretations of the same religion but are, in fact, two different religions. Written at the height of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, the book was controversial at the time of publication 100-years ago. Machen was a professor at Princeton Seminary, one of the last hold-outs against religious modernism in the mainline denominations.
By 1926 the leading religious journal of the day, the Christian Century, would announce that the fundamentalist-modernist controversy was over and the fundamentalists had lost. Henceforth, that perspective on Christianity would sink further into obscurity and irrelevance, eventually fading into oblivion. A few years after his book was published Machen was “defrocked” by the Presbyterian Church. He went on to found Westminster Seminary and to form the Reformed Presbyterian Church.
Christianity Today listed Christianity and Liberalism as one of the 100 most influential books of the 20th Century. I first read the book in 1973, fifty years after its first publication, and remarked in my notes that the book was still as relevant as when first published. Fifty years after, I would agree with World magazine that it is even more relevant.
Today it can be argued that Machen’s perspective was correct and his critics were wrong. It is not that “fundamentalism” (conservative Christianity) was dying and modernism was the wave of the future. It is rather that the Christianity represented by the modernist leaders of the mainline churches is dying and that evangelical and traditionalist Christianity, so spurned by the modernists of 100 years ago, is the best hope for the future of the faith.
A review is in order. What was happening in the Protestant Christian world of 100 years ago and how does that relate to what is happening in 2024? I checked with books in my own library. I have been trying (somewhat unsuccessfully) to downsize my library. Some time ago I started through a section I identified as “Old Liberal Books.” There are thirty books or so dating mostly from the 1880s to the 1950s. I believe I accumulated them when doing research on my book “Evangelical and Methodist: A Populist History (Abingdon, 2004).
There is variation among these books but one thing they share in common: this was a period of extreme religious optimism, at least among the liberal religious leaders of the time. Benjamin Trueblood wrote in 1899 in The Federation of the World:
Christ’s doctrine of the brotherhood of men in the Fatherhood of God was never set forth with so much simplicity, directness, freedom from prejudice, and practical efficiency as in the present generation. (p. 92).
Perhaps the best defense of that assertion, at least for me, was put forward in two books by Harris Franklin Rall, who wrote Modern Premillennialism and Christian Hope (1920) and The Coming Kingdom (1924). Rall was a professor at Garrett Biblical Institute (now Garrett-Evangelical) and was frequently seen on campus in the 1950s when I was at Garrett. He is one of the few writers who even recognized the existence of Premillennialism, which, whether modernists believed it or not, was a major theological option of the end times for many evangelical Christians of that era.
Rall argued that premillennialism was a pessimistic view (the world is getting worse and worse) at a time when the Bible and modern society needed the positive view that the world is getting better and better. Rall’s critique of conservative Christianity was that it took the Bible too literally and did not factor in that God is revealing new truth (progressive revelation). The new truth was that the Coming Kingdom, the brotherhood of man under the Fatherhood of God, was the wave of the future. This is not unlike today when progressives argue that modern culture has taught us that “new truth” and new insights override traditional teaching about matters such as the practice of homosexuality, transgenderism, and the family.
The modernist (progressive) writers of 100 years ago spoke glowingly of a Christian democracy that precluded all authoritarianism. This was often linked with the formation of federations of churches, and/or leagues of nations. A new social order would arise and the human race would be purged from weakness and ignorance:
These things shall be: a loftier race Than e’er the world hath known shall rise With flame of freedom in their souls And light of knowledge in their eyes. (Hymn 512, 1932 Methodist Hymnal)
The new race would be based on science and social planning. Eugenics and racism would be a part of the planning. Long before conservative Christians were accused of White Supremacy, progressives had set the tone.
No race has ever shown such philanthropy, no race is so easily moved by great moral ideas, none is so capable of a moral enthusiasm, none is so quick to accept responsibility for the ignorant, the degraded, the suffering, or to make generous self-sacrifice in their behalf as the Anglo-Saxon. (Josiah Strong: The New Era or The Coming Kingdom, New York: Baker & Taylor Co. 1893, p. 51)
North America…is twice as large as all Europe and is capable of sustaining the present population of the globe. Such a country, with its resources fully developed; such numbers, homogeneous in their civilization; such a race…fitted to prepare the way for the full coming of the kingdom, must under God, control the world’s future. (Strong, The New Era, p. 75)
The rise of Germany leading to the World War complicated the vision but progressives were convinced this was only a minor blip in the great plan of brotherhood for all. Modernists were supporters of World War I, the war that would end all wars, bring world-wide democracy, and usher in an era of peace. By way of contrast, the fundamentalists of the time did not support the war, nor the idea that world peace was around the corner. The reason was sin. If one person could not order his steps aright, why should one believe that a nation could do so. Such views were criticized by persons like Shirley Jackson Case of the University of Chicago who accused “fundamentalists” of being unpatriotic.
Other books (from my library) reiterated these themes. Horatio W. Dresser, On the Threshold of theSpiritual World, (1919); Cornelius H. Patton, World Facts and America’s Responsibility (1919); S. Earl Taylor and Halford E. Luccock, The Christian Crusade for World Democracy, (1918); Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1917).
The predictions of the modernists never were realized. The end of the war brought not world-wide democracy but authoritarian systems in Italy, Spain, Germany, Russia, China, Cuba, and Japan. Still, the idea of new truth being continually revealed kept the dream alive and inspired movements like the World Council of Churches, the Federal Council, the National Council, Churches of Christ Uniting (1960s). Liberation theology led to intrigue with revolutionary movements. One hero, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, is now known for his persecution of Christians. Theological fads, from process theology to idealism to existentialism to death of God theology to womanist theology to feminist theology to Sophia worship kept appearing. By the time I was in seminary (1950s), however, persons like Reinhold Niebuhr and Emil Brunner and Karl Barth began pushing back. In some ways their writings would remind me of Gresham Machen. They spoke of sin and the inability of education and good intentions and political action to bring in the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They spoke of the necessity to revive the Biblical perspective on classic Christian truth. Their theologies were lumped under the title of “neo-orthodoxy.”
Fast forward. At the present time the modernist-liberal-progressive agenda has fallen all over itself to right the wrongs of the world and bring about a new day of justice and equality. There is much talk about “rights” and “equity” and “inclusiveness” and “love,” and yet the world seems more threatening and less accepting of persons different from ourselves than ever.
The recently completed United Methodist General Conference has brought great hope for the progressives, who no longer speak of the “Kingdom of God” (a sexist phrase) but of equity, love and justice for all. At the same time traditional Methodism with Wesleyan doctrines like Original Sin and the Blood Atonement, and long-held traditional values like marriage, the family, and the sexual code of faithfulness in marriage and celibacy in singleness, are cast aside. Justification for this? Keeping up with the times. The wave of history. New truth being revealed that trumps and supersedes long-accepted Bible teaching.
Keep in mind: Mainline denominations are in a 70-year membership decline. Since 1950, the U.S. population has doubled but the churches making up United Methodism today have lost half their members. The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) has lost 75 percent of their members across that same period. The Episcopal Church has lost 40 percent of its membership. One statistic now estimates that only about 14 percent of Americans are associated with one of the mainline denominations. Approximately 25 percent of the population, on the other hand, identifies as “evangelical” (that figure needs a lot of interpretation). Meanwhile, none of the 15 largest seminaries in the country is affiliated with a mainline denomination (one of the larger seminaries is Westminster, the school started by Gresham Machen).
For a number of reasons I still hold to my UM credentials. Like others, I am disappointed by the direction the denomination seems to be taking. The leadership is way out of touch with ordinary members. But God can do great things. For that we pray.
One day after Israel’s incursion into Rafah, the operation is straining relations between the White House and Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained why Israel’s war cabinet decided to enter Rafah and seize the Philadelphi Corridor yesterday, calling it “a very important step on the way to destroying the remaining military capabilities of Hamas, including the elimination of the four terrorist battalions in Rafah.” He emphasized the campaign will damage Hamas’s governmental capabilities.
Reports indicate that a private U.S. company will take over operations at the strategic Rafah border crossing, although the White House has objected to the Rafah operation for months.
Read the full story from CBN Israel’s Chris Mitchell:
cbn.com/cbnnews/israel/2024/may/sen-graham-white-house-blocking-israel-aid-sends-worst-possible-signal-to-the-bad-guys
Fast food chains like McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, Chipotle Jack in the Box, Burger King, Domino’s, and more have reported menu item hikes in places like California that now require a much higher minimum wage.
This comes at a time when fast-food establishments are struggling to make ends meet. Last week, numerous establishments like Taco Bell, Starbucks, KFC, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, and others noted a downtick in quarterly earnings. Fast food was once a cheap and quick alternative to the grocery store before inflation turned any outside dining experience into a luxury. Fast food chains that tend to attract upper-middle clientele like Chipotle have not seen as drastic of a reduction, but value clients earning >$45,000 annually, the core base that these establishments relied on, are not able to eat out.
McDonald’s said it has adopted a “street-fighting mentality” to attract new clients, but that will be a hard target to achieve domestically due to supply chain constraints, food inflation, and now minimum wage requirements. Fast food restaurants saw a 5% price increase overall in March, but states like California are witnessing prices surpass anything that the value client could once afford.
Effective April 1, fast food workers in California now receive a minimum wage of $20 thanks to a new law, AB 1228, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom. California already had one of the highest minimum wage brackets in the country at $15.50.
Chipotle, one of the few establishments that did not post a quarterly loss, was forced to raise prices between 6% and 7% across all 500 California-based locations. “The state isn’t making it easy,” Chipotle Chief Executive Brian Niccol reportedly said. The Wall Street Journal reported that menu items at Chic-Fil-A in California have risen by as much as 13% since mid-February.
Expect companies to begin issuing much smaller portions and automating their workforce. These measures are always passed down to the consumer, and in this instance, the target consumer is already priced out. McDonald’sis already looking at expanding internationally in places like China where it has become more profitable to conduct business. Politicians like Newsom pass these laws that sound great when spoken to the crowd but they are never properly executed because they go against the free market.
We are witnessing an explosion of cancer in the United States that is absolutely unprecedented. As you will see below, it is being projected that the number of new cases of cancer in the U.S. will hit a brand new record high this year, and cancer rates are rising particularly rapidly among our young people. There have been so many prominent individuals in the news that have been diagnosed with cancer recently, and so many people that I personally know have also been diagnosed with cancer recently. I am sure that most of you also personally know people that have been affected by this disease. Of course cancer has been one of the leading causes of death for a very long time, but we have never witnessed anything quite like this.
According to the American Cancer Society, this year the number of newly diagnosed cases of cancer will surpass the 2 million mark for the first time ever…
Cancer incidence, however, is on the rise for many common cancers. In the coming year, we’re expecting to hit a bleak milestone—the first time new cases of cancer in the US are expected to cross the 2-million mark. That’s almost 5,500 cancer diagnoses a day.
This trend is largely affected by the aging and growth of the population and by a rise in diagnoses of 6 of the 10 most common cancers—breast, prostate, endometrial, pancreatic, kidney, and melanoma. (The other 4 top 10 cancers are lung, colon and rectum, bladder, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.)
This is such a great tragedy.
Millions of Americans are dying way too early.
Once upon a time, cancer was considered to be a disease that would strike in old age, but now cancer rates among our young people are absolutely exploding…
According to a new study published this week in BMJ Oncology, cancer rates worldwide have risen dramatically in people under the age of 50.
Researchers examined data from 204 countries between 1990 and 2019. They found that there were more than 3.26 million early-onset cancer cases reported in those countries in 2019, up from 1.82 million in 1990, an increase of 79.1%.
The study defined early-onset cancer as a diagnosis that occurs between the ages of 14 and 49.
I don’t know why researchers only looked at numbers through 2019.
Personally, I would love to see what the figures for the last several years look like.
But everyone agrees that cancer rates among young people are surging like never before.
For example, one study discovered that the number of women under the age of 25 being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer has increased by close to 200 percent since the 1990s…
A ‘frightening’ explosion of young women developing one of the deadliest cancers has baffled experts.
Rates of pancreatic cancer have soared by up to 200 per cent in women under the age of 25 since the 1990s.
Overall, incidences of the disease — which has a five-year survival rate of just 5 per cent — have increased by around 17 per cent over the same time-span, with soaring obesity rates suspected to be behind the trend.
Young people are also getting colon cancer at a staggering rate.
In fact, it is being projected that the number of young people under the age of 40 that will die from colon cancer each year will double by the year 2030…
These findings come at a time when colon cancer deaths among people under 40 are expected to double by 2030, and it is projected to be the number one cause of cancer deaths in young people by the end of the decade.
Overall, rates of all types of gastrointestinal cancer among our young people are skyrocketing, and this has experts deeply alarmed…
Gastrointestinal cancer diagnoses in Americans under 50 climbed drastically over a decade, with the starkest rise occurring in under-19s, at 109 percent.
And the number of GI cancers among children under 19 more than doubled from 2010 to 2019 and overall incidence of GI cancers among under-50s rose by 15 percent.
GI cancers include those in the stomach, esophagus, colon and rectum, liver, pancreas, anus, gall bladder, and small intestine.
The fact that so many young people are getting cancer will mean lots of cash for the cancer industry during the years ahead.
According to the CDC, more than 240 billion dollars will be spent on cancer care in the United States on a yearly basis by 2030.
Just think about that.
That is close to a quarter of a trillion dollars.
If a cure for cancer was found, all of that money would go away.
Unfortunately, cancer rates are likely to continue to go up.
We are being told that approximately 40 percent of all Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, but at the rate that we are going it won’t be too long before that figure hits 50 percent.
Today, we live in a society that is incredibly toxic.
Let me give you an example. According to one recent study, the air that we breathe as we drive our vehicles can literally cause cancer…
Tens of millions of Americans each day breathe in carcinogenic chemicals that are woven into the interiors of their cars, a new study has found.
While opening a window can help reduce the risk, only reforms can keep people safe, researchers wrote in a study in Environmental Science and Technology.
There isn’t anything that we can do about this, because federal law has mandated the use of these carcinogenic chemicals since the 1970s…
Approximately 124 million Americans commute each day, spending an average of an hour in their cars.
By federal law, the interior of these vehicles are required to contain flame retardants, or chemicals that make it harder for them to combust in a crash.
These chemicals have been a legally mandated part of modern cars since the 1970s, when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) passed a law requiring their use.
A study in Singapore looked at the effect of methylglyoxal, a compound released when the body breaks down sugary and fatty foods, on a gene that helps fight off tumors.
In a first, the academics found that methylglyoxal was able to temporarily shut off the BRCA2 gene’s ability to protect against cancer forming and growing.
Doctors have known for decades that eating junk food is linked to a much higher risk of cancer, even if the person is not obese, but the exact mechanism is still being understood.
Needless to say, those two studies are just the tip of the iceberg.
Our air, our water, our soil, our food and thousands of products all around us are absolutely saturated with cancer-causing toxins.
I very much encourage everyone to minimize the risks, but it impossible to totally avoid them.
This is one of the reasons why I proclaim a message of hope to my readers, because the environment in which we live has been transformed into a toxic hell.
We are literally committing societal suicide in so many different ways, and our leaders have absolutely no intention of changing course.
About the Author: Michael Snyder’s extremely controversial new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com. He has also written seven other books that are available on Amazon.com including “End Times”, “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. When you purchase any of Michael’s books you help to support the work that he is doing. You can also get his articles by email as soon as he publishes them by subscribing to his Substack newsletter. Michael has published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and he always freely and happily allows others to republish those articles on their own websites. You can connect with Michael on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and sharing his articles on your own social media accounts is definitely a great help. These are such troubled times, and people need hope. John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” If you have not already done so, we strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.
The nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is famous for his declaration that “God is dead.” That brief dictum does not give the whole story. According to Nietzsche, the cause of the Deity’s demise was compassion. He said, “God is dead; He died of pity.” But before the God who was the God of Judeo-Christianity perished, Nietzsche said that there were a multitude of deities who existed, such as those who resided on Mount Olympus. That is, at one time there was a plurality of gods. All of the rest of the gods perished when one day the Jewish God, Yahweh, stood up in their assembly and said, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Hearing this, according to Nietzsche’s satirical summary, all of the rest of the gods and goddesses died. They died of laughter.
In our day, where pluralism reigns in the culture, there is as much satirical hostility to the idea of one God as there was in Nietzsche’s satire. But today, that repugnance to monotheism is not a laughing matter. In the culture of pluralism, the chief virtue is toleration, which is the notion that all religious views are to be tolerated, all political views are to be tolerated. The only thing that cannot be tolerated is a claim to exclusivity. There is a built-in, inherent antipathy towards all claims of exclusivity. To say that there is one God is repulsive to the pluralists. To say that one God has not revealed Himself by a plurality of avatars in history is also repugnant. A single God with an only begotten Son is a deity who adds insult to injury by claiming an exclusive Son. There cannot be only one Mediator between man and God. There must be many according to pluralists today. It is equally a truism among pluralists that if there is one way to God, there must be many ways to God, and certainly it cannot be accepted that there is only one way. The exclusive claims of Christianity in terms of God, in terms of Christ, in terms of salvation, cannot live in peaceful coexistence with pluralists.
Beyond the question of the existence of God and of His Son, and of a singular way of salvation, there is also a rejection of any claim to having or possessing an exclusive source of divine revelation. At the time of the Reformation, the so-called solas of the Reformation were asserted. It was said that justification is by faith alone (sola fide), that it is through Christ alone (solus Christus), that it is through grace alone (sola gratia), and that it is for God’s glory alone (soli Deo gloria). But perhaps most repugnant to the modern pluralist is the exclusive claim of sola Scriptura. The idea of sola Scriptura is that there is only one written source of divine revelation, which can never be placed on a parallel status with confessional statements, creeds, or the traditions of the church. Scripture alone has the authority to bind the conscience precisely because only Scripture is the written revelation of almighty God. The implications of sola Scriptura for pluralism are many. Not the least of them is this: It carries a fundamental denial of the revelatory character of all other religious books. An advocate of sola Scriptura does not believe that God’s revealed Word is found in the Bible and in the Book of Mormon, the Bible and in the Koran, the Bible and in the Upanishads, the Bible and in the Bhagavad Gita; rather, the Christian faith stands on the singular and exclusive claim that the Bible and the Bible alone is God’s written word.
The motto of the United States is e pluribus unum. However, since the rise of the ideology of pluralism, the real Unum of that motto has been ripped from its foundation. What drives pluralism is the philosophical antecedent of relativism. All truth is relative; therefore, no one idea or source can be seen as having any kind of supremacy. Built into our law system is the idea of the equal toleration under the law of all religions. It is a short step in people’s thinking from equal toleration under the law to equal validity. The principle that all religions should be treated equally under the law and have equal rights does not carry with it the necessary inference that therefore all religions are valid. Even a cursory, comparative examination of the world’s religions reveals points of radical contradiction among them, and unless one is prepared to affirm the equal truth of contradictories, one must not be able to embrace this fallacious assumption.
Sadly, with a philosophy of relativism and a philosophy of pluralism, the science of logic doesn’t matter. Logic is escorted to the door and is firmly booted out of the house onto the street. There is no room for logic in any system of pluralism and relativism. Indeed, it’s a misnomer to call either a system, because it is the idea of a consistent, coherent view of truth that is unacceptable to the pluralist. The fact that people reject exclusive claims to truth does not invalidate those claims. It is the Christian’s duty to hold firm to the uniqueness of God and of His Christ and not compromise with the advocates of pluralism.
This article originally appeared here and is used by permission.
Today, we’re talking about the enemy’s strategies.
For decades now, American students have ranked towards the bottom of industrialized nations in math and nearly as low in other subjects. Believe it or not, American education was once the gold standard of the world.
So, what’s happened?
According to author Joe David, the answer is that American students are no longer taught to THINK.
David said, “It is very rare to find a student with a fresh point of view, derived from clear thinking, secured in place by sound knowledge.”
But don’t blame the kids!
According to David, the government’s nationalized programs have created an environment where achievement-oriented subjects like math, science, language, and logic — ones that actually promote critical thinking — are being upended by an agenda fixated on self-esteem and identity awareness.
Believers need to understand the importance of critical thinking to help reverse education’s downward trend.
And what are other ways the enemy deceives? We’ll discuss them another time.
Carl Kerby is the founder of Reasons for Hope and co-creator of the DeBunked apologetic video series. His radio feature, Fast Facts, is heard weekly on VCY America, Saturdays at 9:25 AM Central.
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