Category: Religion

Crazy People Are Dangerous

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When weighing career opportunities, most of us never give any consideration to cult leader as a job worth pursuing. However, I’ve spent some time contemplating the pros and cons of such a gig, and reached the conclusion that I’m simply not cut out for that kind of work. For starters, to be an effective cult leader requires a rare combination of traits — the charisma necessary to attract a loyal following of gullible idiots, the cleverness to come up with a uniquely weird belief system, and the cunning cruelty to exploit the aforesaid gullible followers.

Just not my idea of fun, really. So as much as I might enjoy imposing my personalized brand of Divine Wisdom on a brainwashed mob, enjoying the pleasure of polygamous relations with their nubile daughters, etc., I simply lack the basic aptitude, even if I were willing to accept the risk of the way cults typically end. Dying in a shootout with the FBI or serving a life sentence in federal prison are outcomes I’d prefer to avoid, so scratch “cult leader” from the career list. But there are other considerations.

How do cult leaders come up with the implausible bullshit they foist on their followers, and where do they find people stupid enough to believe it? Well, that’s what the Internet’s for, as exemplified by the Colorado-based “Love Has Won” cult and its deceased leader, Amy Carlson:

According to her family, Amy Carlson grew up in Dallas, Texas, and was a “straight A student”. In Carlson’s early adult life, however, she began to talk increasingly about “outlandish concepts” such as starships. During the mid 2000s, Carlson developed an interest in New Age philosophy, and became a regular poster on the forums of the website Lightworkers.org. On the forum, she met Amerith WhiteEagle, who convinced Carlson that she was divine, and Carlson began to claim to experience paranormal phenomena. In late 2007, Carlson left her third husband, her children, and her job as a manager at McDonald’s, and ceased contact with most members of her family, and joined up with WhiteEagle in Colorado. The group was originally known under the name “Galactic Federation of Light”. The group posted their first videos to YouTube in 2009.

There is a new HBO documentary series about Carlson and her cult, and Saturday night I watched part of the first episode, enough to reach the conclusion that almost anyone could have their own cult nowadays, because the Internet provides access to an effectively unlimited supply of gullible followers. Nearly all of Carlson’s followers were the kind of dopeheads we used to call “burnouts,” people who’d done too much LSD and permanently fried their cerebral cortex. These wild-eyed kooks are interviewed for the documentary and let’s just say that none of them seem to have a very firm grasp on reality. Which isn’t surprising, when you consider the cult’s belief system:

The theology of Love Has Won has been described as fluid, combining New Age spirituality, conspiracy theories, and elements from mainstream Abrahamic religions. The group proclaimed that Carlson was a divine, 19 billion year-old being who had birthed all creation. Carlson claimed she had been reincarnated 534 times, including as Jesus, Joan of Arc, Marilyn Monroe and Cleopatra, and would lead 144,000 people into a mystical “5th dimension”. Carlson had several romantic partners throughout the group’s history, beginning with Amerith WhiteEagle, who were referred to as “Father God”, and who played a counterpart role to Carlson in the theology of the group. The group also adopted elements of the QAnon conspiracy theory.
The group claimed that Carlson was the queen of the lost continent of Lemuria, and the group incorporated the belief that Lemurians live within Mount Shasta in California.[9] Carlson had stated that Donald Trump was her father in a past life, and that she had spoken to the spirit of deceased actor Robin Williams, who she claimed was archangel Zadkiel. The group’s theology also included references to the concepts of Atlantis, the Anunnaki and “reptilians”. They believed that the world was run by a “cabal” determined to keep the planet in a “low vibration” state.

Unfortunately for the “Queen of the Lost Continent of Lemuria” and her followers, Carlson died at age 45 from a combination of anorexia, alcohol abuse and colloidal silver poisoning.

“COLLOIDAL SILVER POISONING”?

This is an unusual twist. We’re used to cult leaders dying in mass suicide rituals or being gunned down in a hail of automatic weapons fire. But what the heck is this colloidal silver thing?

Colloidal silver consists of tiny silver particles in a liquid. It is sometimes promoted on the internet as a dietary supplement; however, evidence supporting health-related claims is lacking.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has warned that colloidal silver isn’t safe or effective for treating any disease or condition. Additionally, the FDA and the Federal Trade Commission have taken action against a number of companies for making misleading claims about colloidal silver products.
Colloidal silver can cause serious side effects. The most common is argyria, a build-up of silver in the body’s tissues causing a bluish-gray discoloration of the skin, which is usually permanent.
Colloidal silver can cause poor absorption of some drugs, such as certain antibiotics and thyroxine (used to treat thyroid deficiency). There is also some evidence that it can cause kidney, liver, or nervous system problems.

This explains why, when law enforcement in Saguache County, Colorado, found the mummified corpse of Amy Carlson, she was blue.

What sort of lessons can we learn from this? To me, it’s about how the Internet creates niche echo chambers of like-minded people. Even the tiniest fraction of a single percentage point of the population represents an audience of thousands, when you realize that there are 1.2 billion English-speaking Internet users worldwide (one-tenth of one percent = 1,200,000). Given the basic mathematics of the equation, it’s not really strange that “Mother God” Carlson could get 20,000 online followers, of whom about two dozen moved to Colorado to join her cult IRL.

Speaking of weird cult beliefs, the director of the HBO documentary is a liberal with an Ivy League diploma, who sees this as a political morality tale about health care and income inequality:

The self-styled deity sold remote healings and slowly gained an impressive online audience: almost 20,000 followers on Facebook and nearly 10,000 on YouTube. The group’s videos were watched more than 1.5 million times. All the while, she convinced more and more people to escape their lives and join her party. “You were high from the moment you woke up to the moment you went to bed,” a former follower recalls in the series.
Many who devoted themselves to Mother God were escaping one specific reality, according to [producer/director Hannah] Olson. “This is a group of people who were traumatized by the health care system,” the director says. One member arrived after struggling with an opioid addiction. Another found the group after losing his father to that same disease. One young woman joined after waking up from a coma to discover she owed half a million dollars in medical bills. “Love Has Won exists,” says Olson, “because people were searching online for how to heal their bodies and minds, because they could not afford to go to a doctor.” Many, if not all, were without insurance; the uninsured rate for American adults stood at 11% earlier this year.
“Reality doesn’t make sense for a lot of people because of the enormous income inequality,” Olson says. “My generation has not inherited the world we were promised.” (The director is a millennial.)

Like I said, weird cult beliefs. Despite the director’s politics, I haven’t found any liberal sermonizing in this HBO documentary, which is like watching a slow-motion train wreck, with a trainload of kooks.



 

Geert Wilders Wins; Left Freaks Out

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Stunning news this week from the Netherlands:

Geert Wilders and his Party for Freedom (PVV) have swept to a stunning victory in Dutch elections, with exit polls predicting that his populist anti-mass migration party will become the largest force in the House of Representatives in the Netherlands. . . .
Performing in a way that many would have considered unthinkable just a week ago, the populist party is now projected to have more than doubled its representation over the previous election in 2021 when the PVV only managed to secure 17 seats in the House.
The PVV was followed by the leftist-green coalition GL-PvdA of Great Reset proponent Frans Timmermans at 26 seats, the centre-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) at 23 seats, and the centrist New Social Contract (NSC) at 20.

Liberal media are trying to portray Wilders as a Trump imitator, when in fact Wilders long preceded the Trump phenomenon. When I heard the news of Wilders’ victory, the first person I thought of was Pamela Geller, who brought Wilders to CPAC in 2009. Wilders was also the keynote speaker at a Geller-organized 2015 event in Garland, Texas, that was attacked by two ISIS-inspired terrorists. These headlines give a taste of how Wilders’ victory inspired panic among liberals:

Dutch election winner Geert Wilders is
an anti-Islam firebrand known
as the Dutch Donald Trump
— Associated Press

Far-Right Populist Geert Wilders Scores
Major Victory in Dutch Election
— Wall Street Journal

Dutch Election Results Deliver
a Turn to the Far Right
— New York Times

Opposition to mass immigration is “far right,” the media declare flatly, even though polling shows that a majority of U.S. voters believe (and have believed for many years) that the border is out of control, that illegal immigration is a serious problem, and that the overall level of immigration is too high. Most Americans want less immigration, and especially want stricter enforcement to prevent illegal immigration — but such opinions are “far right,” according to the media. This is an interesting example of media manipulation, whereby a mainstream (majority) opinion is transmogrified into an “extremist” position, while the fringe beliefs of the Left are treated as if they were mainstream.

Geert Wilders was ahead of his time, calling attention to immigration-related problems that most politicians (and their media allies) don’t want people to notice. When the 2015 “refugee crisis” hit Europe, suddenly what had been seen as a “far right” fringe became the voice of a majority. The left-leaning “elite” in politics and media tried to prevent this majority from gaining power, but as the victory of Wilders shows, a determined people can overwhelm elite resistance. Congratulations!



 

Elliot Rodger and Nick Fuentes: The Satanic Politics of Self-Destruction

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The first I remember hearing of Nick Fuentes was when Michelle Malkin tried to retrieve him from the trash dump of Jew-hating nihilism. That must have been 2019, and I don’t know if Malkin (whom I greatly admire) has expressed regret over the evident failure of that effort.

Malkin has been a stalwart opponent of our de facto open borders policy for as long as I’ve known her, and I suppose she must have seen some potential in Fuentes and his following of “Groypers.” Try to steer these misguided young fellows back onto the path of sanity, she probably figured in her maternal way, but three years later there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of reform, as Fuentes continues to play the role of Holocaust-denying Pied Piper, a sort of 21st-century Willis Carto.

Those who take the turn down the Jew-hating road never arrive at any good destination, and surely this is no coincidence. Clearly, God intends to keep the promise quoted in Genesis 12:3, and no wise man would deliberately choose to get on the wrong side of that issue.

Having always been a philo-Semite, and somewhere to the right of Bibi Netanyahu in terms of my ultra-Zionist tendencies, I have long contemplated the cosmic significance of such things, but realize that “now we see through a glass, darkly,” and must patiently await the workings of divine providence. But I digress . . .

Hate Leader Nick Fuentes
Is Recruiting Incels
The racist troll who dined with Trump is courting
a new online following: raging misogynists.

That’s the headline on a 2,500-word story in Mother Jones, where the editors apparently believe it is newsworthy that guys who can’t get laid could be an important political constituency. Am I the only one who wonders about the correlation between (a) conspiratorial hatred of Jews and (b) inability to get laid? It’s sort of like the connection between feminism and obesity, I suspect. Ordinarily, I would pay no attention to Nick Fuentes, but the editors of Mother Jones want me to do so, and for some reason the comparison that springs to mind is Elliot Rodger.

Humanity… All of my suffering on this world has been at the hands of humanity, particularly women. It has made me realize just how brutal and twisted humanity is as a species. All I ever wanted was to fit in and live a happy life amongst humanity, but I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me.
This is the story of how I, Elliot Rodger, came to be. This is the story of my entire life. It is a dark story of sadness, anger, and hatred. It is a story of a war against cruel injustice . . .

So begins “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger,” the 100,000-word “manifesto” he published online to announce the motive for his 2014 murder spree — the Mein Kampf of Beta male losers.

How does this happen? What kind of person decides that the ideal solution to his personal problems is mass murder? A telltale clue came from Rodger’s manifesto, where he mentions Monette Moio, “a pretty blonde girl” who was the younger sister of one of his middle-school classmates. According to Rodger, she was part of “a group of popular Seventh Grade girls [who] started teasing me. . . . I started to hate all girls because of this. I saw them as mean, cruel, and heartless creatures that took pleasure from my suffering.” This enraged the girl’s father:

‘She was ten years old for God’s sake — she can barely remember the guy. He’s a sociopath. She hasn’t seen him since school.’
‘She’s devastated over the whole thing. . . . It’s like she’s being implicated in this terrible tragedy for something she hasn’t done and can’t remember.’ . . .
Mr Moio added that he and his daughter only remembers Rodger as a ‘strange kid’.
‘He was weird then and he’s weird now,’ he said. ‘He had a secret crush on her, but she was completely unaware of him. She had no idea… If you think about it, he could have killed her, he could have come after her.
‘I was hands on at that school and I don’t remember him. She just remembers that he was a strange kid, she knew he wasn’t a normal type person, but there are a lot of people like that at that age.’

In other words, it was all in Elliot Rodger’s mind — the “teasing” was imaginary, his “suffering” the product of his silent obsession with a cute girl who “was completely unaware of him.” And as for his “war against cruel injustice” — what he described in a YouTube video as his “day of retribution” — it was nothing but a violent gesture to dramatize and call attention to his ultimate choice of suicide. Rodger scapegoated innocent people, blaming them for his personal problems, but his “day of retribution” ended with the tacit admission that only way to end his “suffering” was to kill himself. He was the problem.

Nick Fuentes doing his “America First” podcast

The 24-year-old hosts a nightly broadcast with a cult-like following among young white men who believe they have lost their rightful place in the United States. For the last five years, Fuentes has pushed a vision for an “America First” movement that fuses white nationalism, antisemitism, and authoritarianism in calling for a nation dominated by white Christian men. . . .
Fuentes is advancing one of his latest strategies for cultivating followers: making overtures to men who feel aggrieved by women.
Over the past year, Fuentes has made a point of speaking directly to these men — many of whom identify as “incels” — in numerous appearances on his nightly livestream, far-right podcasts, and Telegram. Historically, incels defined themselves as “involuntary celibate,” but the term has become inextricably associated with misogynist incels, men who blame women for their problems and believe women owe them sex.
Fuentes claims to understand them because he is one of them. “I’m an incel, I’m a proud incel,” he claimed on his nightly America First podcast in January. He’d never had sex, he explained, because, “I’m choosing instead to lead a historical right-wing movement.”

Let’s talk about this “cult-like following.” Prior to the publicity he got for meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the audience for Fuentes’ videos was pathetically small, reaching somewhere between 1,800 and 6,000 viewers for each episode. In October, as the nation was preparing for the midterm elections, some of his videos got fewer than 1,000 views. So if you’re using “cult-like” as a synonym for tiny, then, yeah, Nick Fuentes has got a “cult-like following.” And probably a “cult-like” penis, too.

Since the Mar-a-Lago meeting, the size of Fuentes’ audience has grown to the tens of thousands, but that’s still an insignificant number in comparison to, say, Tim Pool, who has 1.3 million YouTube subscribers and routinely gets more than 200,000 views on his videos.

It should be obvious that the reason Mother Jones (and other liberal media) are giving a fringe figure like Fuentes free publicity is as a way to smear all conservatives as implicated in his craziness. And let there be no doubt about this — it is unmitigated lunacy:

Fuentes launched into what sounded like a political stump speech in which he outlined the world he would create with his followers’ help. “Why don’t we take the message to the men and say, ‘Hey men, hey men, vote for me, I’ll destroy feminism,” he said, vowing to “make it harder for women to become whores,” and “to incentivize women to be in monogamous marriages for the long term and to have and raise kids.”
The dark fantasy he was selling would not only fulfill his Christian nationalist agenda, it would give incels the unfettered access to women that they’ve long sought. That alignment is part of what makes Fuentes’ pro-misogyny marketing strategy so effective, says Right Wing Watch researcher Kyle Mantyla. “If they can impose Christian nationalism on this country, that will also solve their incel problem by making women second-class citizens who have no right to refuse to marry them, have sex with them, and bear their children.”

Can you even imagine being Kyle Mantyla, who has been on the payroll of People for the American Way since 1999, and it’s your job to pay attention to people like Nick Fuentes? Talk about “suffering” . . .

You cannot solve self-inflicted problems by scapegoating, and what the “incel” delusion has in common with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories is that both offer explanations for personal failure that focus on blaming others. Anti-Semitism is not really political at all. It’s not about U.S. policy in the Mideast or about Israel’s policy toward its neighbors, it’s about losers (both foreign and domestic) who view Israel and the Jews the same way Elliot Rodger viewed Monette Moio, as “mean, cruel, and heartless creatures that took pleasure from my suffering.” Even as we recognize the appeal of scapegoating by “right-wing” figures like Nick Fuentes, however, we must avoid the temptation to buy into the Left’s identity-politics victimhood mentality, which is the same damned thing.

Telling black people they’re oppressed by “systemic racism” is no more helpful that telling people that they’re victims of an international Zionist conspiracy, and the fact that Kanye West has apparently been sucked into the vortex of anti-Semitism shows how similar these beliefs really are. And both of these persecution fantasies are similar to the “incel” thinking his problems in life are the fault of the cute girl who (at least in his mind) was mean to him in seventh grade. It does not matter, in the grand scheme of things, that some cute girls actually are cruel, or that some white people really are racists, because these facts are inadequate as explanations of individual unhappiness. That is to say, there are black people who are happy and successful despite the reality of racism and, on a personal note, I have managed to have a pretty good life despite the fact that Vicky Jones never reciprocated my interest in seventh grade.

Likewise, the existence of bad Jews (e.g., George Soros) does not prove the existence of an all-powerful Jewish conspiracy, especially when we realize that some of Soros’ most vocal critics are themselves Jewish. But the Left wants you to believe that everyone who criticizes Soros is an ideological soulmate of Nick Fuentes and the danger is that people will start believing this: “If they’re going to call me an anti-Semite no matter what I do, why not just go all-in on this Jew-hating thing?”

The Left’s incessant name-calling — “racist! sexist! homophobe!” — can have a demoralizing effect on conservatives, and when you find yourself on their target list, it’s a test of character, requiring strength to resist their attempt to define you as evil. The Left is satanic in this way.

Satan is a liar (John 8:44), and a false accuser (Revelation 12:10) who “deceiveth the whole world” by his slanders against God, and against God’s people. When the Left aims its slander machine at you, the experience should give you some sense of what Jesus felt when he was falsely accused by the envious Pharisees, and when you reflect that Jesus was entirely blameless — whereas you are unquestionably a sinner — then you must realize that, however unjust the accusations against you may be, you cannot lash out at the enemies who chastise you.

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”
— Romans 8:28 (KJV)

Exult in your chastisement! Take pride in your scars! If you love God and are truly seeking His will, then your suffering is proof that you are among “them who are called.” How you conduct yourself in the moment of crisis will be the test of your faith, and the proof of God’s favor.

It is not God’s will that we should be miserable and hopeless, tempted to self-destructive despair. Jesus said: “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:8). So who is it that’s pointing people down the road to destruction? Who is it that tells us we must surrender to hate? Could it be . . . Satan?

Knowing myself to be nothing but a wretched sinner, my Calvinistic belief can be summarized simply: If God means to destroy a man, no one can save him, but if God means to save a man, no one can destroy him.

However vain it may be to think of myself as indestructible, it is nonetheless a fact that I have not yet been destroyed by my enemies, who have never ceased to plot my destruction. God keeps His promises, and we must remember that it is not by our virtue that we deserve His favor, but rather that we are beneficiaries of His grace.

We are “sinners in the hands of an angry God,” as Jonathan Edwards said, and are entirely dependent on God’s mercy for our preservation. We have no ground to complain for whatever misfortunes may befall us, since our sinfulness means we deserve nothing but death.

It was not my intention, when I began writing this, to preach a sermon, but here I am 2,000 words later, at the point a preacher would issue the altar call, with the choir singing “Softly and Tenderly.” Occasionally this blog is a mission and a ministry, I reckon, and perhaps a comfort to our Internet congregation, a source of hope amid the prevailing gloom. Earlier this month, the radical mayor of Richmond ordered that the remains of A.P. Hill be exhumed and his monument be removed from the intersection of Laburnum Road and Hermitage venue. When my great-grandfather, a private in the 13th Alabama Infantry, was captured at Gettysburg, he was serving under A.P. Hill; thus I have a personal reason to resent the insult to that general’s memory. Yet I can endure even this without complaint, as I recall the words of a man far wiser than myself:

My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them nor indisposed me to serve them; nor in spite in spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present aspect of affairs, do I despair of the future.
The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.

Yes, sir. We shall carry on. Merry Christmas, and Deo vindice.



 

A Simple Idea: ‘Four or More’

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Yesterday, Ace of Spades jabbed Jonathan V. Last as one of “True Conservatives Conserving Conservatism at The Bulwark” — a jab richly deserved, but it filled me with a sense of sadness, because Last used to be so good, before he fell victim to Trump Derangement Syndrome.

What To Expect When No One’s Expecting was, and still is, a book well worth reading. To quote the dust-jacket summary:

For years, we have been warned about the looming danger of overpopulation: people jostling for space on a planet that’s busting at the seams and running out of oil and food and land and everything else.
It’s all bunk. The “population bomb” never exploded. Instead, statistics from around the world make clear that since the 1970s, we’ve been facing exactly the opposite problem: people are having too few babies. Population growth has been slowing for two generations. The world’s population will peak, and then begin shrinking, within the next fifty years. In some countries, it’s already started. . . .
What to Expect When No One’s Expecting explains why the population implosion happened and how it is remaking culture, the economy, and politics both at home and around the world.
Because if America wants to continue to lead the world, we need to have more babies.

Of course, I didn’t need any lectures on that topic, being a father of six, but still this was an important message, and Last marshaled an array of arguments on behalf of this pro-natalist message. What To Expect When No One’s Expecting followed in the footsteps of the late Ben Wattenberg’s 1987 book The Birth Dearth, which was the first examination of the modern trend of demographic decline in industrial societies. Wattenberg later followed that up with Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future (2004).

As should be obvious, these warnings have been largely ignored. There has been no new “Baby Boom” in response to the concerns raised by Last’s book, or Watterberg’s books, and the question is, why?

Permit me to share the insight of personal experience: People’s behaviors are limited by their imagination. That is to say, people generally don’t attempt things they regard as impossible and, in the minds of most Americans, having a large family is a financial impossibility. Even if they wished to have lots of kids, they can’t figure out how it could be done, from the perspective of their personal economic situation.

They can’t afford it, they say.

OK, believe what you want to believe, but how is it that I could afford it, if you can’t? Do you suppose I’m some kind of financial genius? An heir to the Rockefeller fortune? No, of course, they realize that my wife and I don’t have some hidden pile of cash that has enabled us to raise all these kids; we were just willing to make sacrifices that most people aren’t willing to make. And that knowledge makes them embarrassed.

This embarrassment expresses itself as defensiveness, especially among conservative Christians who understand that they are not exactly practicing what they preach, as regards “family values.” Sure, maybe it’s silly to think that every faithful Christian couple would strive to spawn a Duggar-sized brood, but insofar as we are pro-life, isn’t it logical that we would be more welcoming to offspring as blessings from God?

“See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil. . . . I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”
— Deuteronomy 30:15, 19 (KJV)

“Therefore choose life” — this quote from Deuteronomy became a slogan for the pro-life movement, but how many pro-life conservatives have tried to live out the meaning of that phrase? Most people wouldn’t judge me to be a particularly fine example of Christian virtue, but despite my failings, at least I got this part right. And along the way, I picked up a few helpful pieces of advice. When our oldest was just a little baby, and my Dad came to visit us for the first time after she’d been born, we were living in a roach-infested $250-a-month rental home in Gordon County, Georgia. When I complained about our financial situation, my Dad laughed and said, “Son, if you wait to have kids until you can afford to have kids, you’ll never have kids.” Truer words were never spoken.

Ten years later, after we’d moved to the D.C. area so I could work at The Washington Times, our family had grown to four kids, and in July 1999, I saw this item on a pro-life website:

Where are the children?
In reacting to a report released today by the statistics office of the European Union, STOPP International director Jim Sedlak said, “This report points out what we have been yelling from the rooftops for some time now — the world needs larger families.”
The Eurostat report warns that European Union countries can expect health and pension costs to soar over the next 50 years as the number of people over retirement age rises to about one third of the total population. “The main cause of the aging,” according to the report, “is the decline in births over the last two to three decades.”
“The ‘success’ of the population controllers in Europe is now taking its toll,” said Sedlak. “The average number of babies per woman has fallen from 1.95 to 1.65, and there is no end in sight.”
“In order to turn things around, four things are necessary,” Sedlak said. “First, the world has to understand that there is not an overpopulation problem, but a problem of too few children. Second, everyone in our society must accept large families and stop using peer pressure to convince people not to have more children. Third, governments and rich philanthropists must stop giving money to population control programs. Finally, young people getting married have to be thinking of having four or more children.”
“We have one generation to turn things around,” Sedlak said. “After that, it may be too late.”

The author of that short article, Jim Sedlak, was a remarkable individual. A research physicist, Sedlak worked for IBM for 30 years before retiring in 1993, at age 50, “to devote a full-time effort to the pro-life cause.” A devout Catholic, Sedlak was particularly a critic of classroom “sex education,” and founded Stop Planned Parenthood (STOPP), which eventually became part of the American Life League, of which Sedlak became Executive Director. He died earlier this year, but I had the chance to talk to him a few times over the years, and he was full of wisdom about our culture, including this simple idea: “Four or more.”

Sedlak had studied the demographics of the Baby Boom, and understood this: It was largely a Catholic phenomenon. Most people don’t realize this, because the way we think about population trends usually focuses on medians and averages, without much thought to the human variables behind such statistics. The Baby Boom peaked in 1957, when the U.S. Total Fertility Rate (TFR) reached 3.77 average lifetime births per woman. If you think hard about that number, you realize that it means the average American woman in 1957 was three times more likely to have four children as to have merely three. To reach such an astonishing figure, however, you must first account for those women who will ultimately be childless, and whose contribution to the total is zero. Such a subtraction means that the average mother (as opposed to the average woman) was even more likely to have at least four children. And, as this 3.77 TFR number was an average, it means that for every woman who had only two children in 1957, there was another woman who had five or six. For every “only child” born in 1957, there was another child born into a family with six or seven siblings. Large families were what really made the “Baby Boom” happen and, among these super-sized families, Catholics were a disproportionately large share. The Catholic Church’s doctrine against artificial contraceptives was taken seriously back then, and the decline of that faithfulness is the real cultural explanation of the changing demographic trend over the past 60 years.

Of course, I’m Protestant, but the issue with Catholics and their declining fertility rate is illustrative of the overall trend. While different Protestant denominations have different approaches to these questions, in general, more conservative Protestants are inclined toward the “pro-life”/“pro-family” beliefs so elaborately spelled out in the various encyclicals (e.g., Humanae Vitae) that codify Catholic doctrine on this subject.

The salt has “lost its savour” would be the best description of what’s happened, in terms of Christian family practice in recent decades. One might imagine that self-identified Catholics would still have substantially higher fertility rates than the average American, but they don’t — they have been “conformed to this world,” and the same is true of evangelical Christians. The commandment to “be ye separate” — to have no fellowship with unrighteousness — seems to have been forgotten, so that many Christians are now just following the crowd, and making the same lifestyle choices as the unchurched. This is true about many things, including divorce, and few church spokesmen seem willing to speak out against this trend. Church leadership is not leading.

People make trends, not the other way around. The choices you make, as an individual, have an influence far beyond your own awareness, and what you practice will ultimately have more influence than what you preach, if you don’t live up to own professed beliefs.

Our ability, as individuals, to influence something so large as the national birth rate may seem infinitesimally small, and Jonathan V. Last’s book apparently failed to make a dent in the trend. But our actions ultimately make more difference than any author’s words, and you don’t need a whole book to explain it. “Four or more” — a very simple idea.

Now, to find a cure for Trump Derangement Syndrome . . .




 

NY State Police Mystified by Motive of Muslim Who Stabbed Salman Rushdie

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The victim has been under an Iranian fatwa since 1989, but state police in New York don’t want to rush to conclusions:

Salman Rushdie, whose novel “The Satanic Verses” drew death threats from Iran’s leader in the 1980s, was stabbed in the neck and abdomen Friday by a man who rushed the stage as the author was about to give a lecture in western New York.
A bloodied Rushdie, 75, was flown to a hospital and underwent surgery. His agent, Andrew Wylie, said the writer was on a ventilator Friday evening, with a damaged liver, severed nerves in his arm and an eye he was likely to lose.
Police identified the attacker as Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview, New Jersey. He was arrested at the scene and was awaiting arraignment. Matar was born a decade after “The Satanic Verses” was published. The motive for the attack was unclear, State Police Maj. Eugene Staniszewski said.

Are you f***ing kidding me with this? The New York Post:

Law enforcement sources told The Post that an initial investigation suggests Matar has made social media posts in support of Iran and its Revolutionary Guard, and in support of Shi’a extremism more broadly.

Where was Hadi Matar born? Where is his family from? Can we please stop pretending that he’s just a random “New Jersey man”?




 

Biden Was Wrong, Kirby Was Right: Albuquerque Muslim Murders Were Not — NOT — Motivated by ‘Hate’

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My brother Kirby has a keen sense of probability. We were sitting outside our local convenience store having coffee on Sunday, when he started ranting about a story out of New Mexico to which I hadn’t paid attention. Four Muslim men had been murdered in the span of a few days, and President Biden (or, at least, whatever White House staffer is running his Twitter account) issued a statement condemning the “hateful attacks.” Kirby expressed doubt that this was some kind anti-Muslim hate crime. Why? All four victims were from the same mosque, Kirby pointed out, and it seemed to him that this was significant. Well, I said, we’ll wait and see. The killer couldn’t possibly get away with this, I said, because of ubiquitous video surveillance, so it probably wouldn’t be long until they announced an arrest. Oh, did you notice how Biden said he “stands strongly with the Muslim community”? Someone should ask him whether he stands with the Shi’ite Muslims or the Sunni Muslims, because Albuquerque police arrested a suspect Tuesday and — call it a hunch — but I don’t think Syed Muhammad is a MAGA-hat wearing Trump voter:

Police said Tuesday that they were investigating whether a string of murders that have shaken Albuquerque was motivated by a Sunni Muslim father’s anger over his daughter marrying a Shiite Muslim.
Muhammad Syed, 51, has been charged with the murders of two Muslim men in New Mexico’s largest city, and faces possible charges for the murders of two other Muslim men killed in the last nine months.
Authorities said in a press release that “the offender knew the victims to some extent, and an interpersonal conflict may have led to the shootings.”
Ahmad Assed, president of the city’s largest mosque, told The New York Times that authorities informed him the shooter is a Sunni Muslim who may have targeted the victims because he was angry over his daughter marrying a Shiite Muslim.
At a press conference Tuesday afternoon, Albuquerque’s deputy chief, Kyle Hartsock, said police are still investigating the motive behind the slayings, but acknowledged the theory that Syed targeted victims because he was angry over his daughter’s marriage. “We’re not sure if that’s the only motivation,” Hartsock said, adding that they’re “still investigating it.”
The men killed have been identified as Mohammad Ahmadi, 62, Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, 27, Aftab Hussein, 41, and Naeem Hussain, 25.
Syed faces murder charges for the deaths of Aftab Hussein and Muhammad Afzaal Hussain, police said Tuesday, and remains the prime suspect in the other two homicides. A gun traced back to two of the homicide scenes was found during a search of Syed’s home, authorities said. . . .
Syed is the only suspect being investigated as of Tuesday, Hartsock said. Authorities are not labeling him a “serial killer” and said that, at this point, they still do not believe the murders were a hate crime.
Syed is a native of Afghanistan who has lived in New Mexico the “last several years,” Hartsock said. He’s been arrested on domestic violence charges three times in recent years, but all the charges were eventually dropped. . . .
As police connected the four murders to a single shooter, authorities released a photo of a silver sedan they believed was driven by the suspect. On Tuesday, Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina posted to Twitter just before 1 p.m. local time that the car had been found.
“We tracked down the vehicle believed to be involved in a recent murder of a Muslim man in Albuquerque,” Medina wrote. “The driver was detained and he is our primary suspect for the murders.”
Sherry Shafiq, a friend of Afzaal Hussain, told The Daily Beast he was relieved that the alleged killer was caught. Over the past few days, he said, his community was living in fear while a suspect was on the loose. Some Muslim residents stayed home or kept hyper-vigilant of their surroundings.
“It’s heartbreaking news,” Shafiq said. “It’s one of the community members. It was a possibility that had crossed our minds, but never in my wildest dreams would I imagine someone in the community would do such a heinous crime.”

He “can’t imagine” a Muslim committing “such a heinous crime” because vengeance and honor killings are unheard of in the Islamic community.

Somebody should tell Joe Biden he was wrong. Of course, he’s been so wrong about so many things, this isn’t really surprising.




 

The Mysterious Motive

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A huge clue that Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) are just using the phrase “white supremacy” to exploit fear for political gain:

On Sunday, Joe Biden acknowledged the Texas synagogue hostage situation, dubbing the incident an “act of terror,” but refused to “speculate” on Akram’s motives when asked about it by reporters.
“No, I don’t. I — there’s speculation, but I’m not going to get into that. I will — I’m going to have a press conference on Wednesday, and I’ll be happy to go into detail of what I know in detail at that time,” Biden said in a press conference Sunday.
The now-dead hostage-taker was identified as Malik Faisal Akram, and he demanded the release of Aafia Siddiqui, a jihadi known as “Lady al Qaeda.”
Just like the FBI, Biden seems intent on “whitewashing” Akram’s motives. Akram only targeted a synagogue. I wonder what his motives were.
This insistence on pretending that Akram’s motives are unknown is troubling but not surprising. So much of this incident doesn’t fit the preferred narrative of the political left.
But it wasn’t all that long ago that Joe Biden was very willing to speculate the motives of Kyle Rittenhouse — who shot and killed two people in self-defense during the Kenosha riots — and label him a white supremacist without any proof whatsoever.
In 2020, in the final months of the presidential campaign, Biden featured a photo of Rittenhouse in a video posted to Twitter accusing Trump of refusing to “disavow white supremacists” . . .
Then Biden falsely linked Rittenhouse to white supremacists during an interview on CNN with Anderson Cooper.
“I don’t know enough to know whether that 17-year-old kid, exactly what he did, but allegedly he’s part of a militia coming out of the state of Illinois. Have you ever heard this president say one negative thing about white supremacists? Have you ever heard it? That’s the reason I got back in this race because of what happened in Charlottesville,” Biden claimed.
The only thing he got right was Rittenhouse’s age. Everything else was wrong. He wasn’t part of a militia. He wasn’t a white supremacist. A jury of his peers also agreed he acted in self-defense and found him not guilty.
Biden never apologized to Rittenhouse for his smears. In light of his unwillingness to “speculate” about Akram’s motives, Rittenhouse deserves an apology now more than ever.

Biden and other Democrats wouldn’t do this without the willing collusion of the media. If journalists were as critical of Democrats as they are of Republicans, Biden and his advisors would know they couldn’t engage in such irresponsible rhetoric without being called out on it. The idea that America is a nation besieged by “white supremacy” is absurd, but because liberals in the media understand this phrase to be code for “Republican voters,” they’re willing to let Biden and other Democrats get away with this disgusting smear. Oh, but you can’t say that a Muslim who takes hostages in a synagogue might be an anti-Semite because that could incite Islamophobia! Meanwhile in England:

The terrorist attack on a synagogue in Colleyville, Texas Saturday during Shabbat services ended after an eleven-hour ordeal. Fortunately, the four men held hostage, including the rabbi, were released unharmed. The Jihadi terrorist, a British national, is dead. His identity was released on Sunday.
Malik Faisal Akram, a 44-year-old Muslim from Blackburn, traveled two weeks ago to the United States and lived in homeless shelters before Saturday. His brother says he was mentally ill and asks a good question – why was Malik Akram allowed into the U.S. with his criminal record? . . .
Two teens from Manchester were arrested and are still in custody. There is little information coming forward on them, due to their ages. . . .
From the first statement issued by the FBI on Saturday night, there has been a lack of honesty in how the FBI has spoken about the terror attack. In an initial statement, an agent referred to the terrorist as a hostage taker and claimed that there was no known motive. He also said there was no indication that of a larger plot involved. By Sunday night, the FBI finally called it what it was – an anti-Semitic terrorism attack on a synagogue during worship services. Why was that so hard? Never mind, that’s a rhetorical question. Everyone following the story knew what it was from the beginning. The man admitted he traveled “5,000 miles” and chose the synagogue because of its proximity to DFW airport. That was heard on the live stream during the ordeal.

So, in the case of Rittenhouse, Biden falsely claimed to know the teenager was a “white supremacist,” but now the FBI pretends it doesn’t recognize the motive in what was self-evidently an anti-Semitic terrorist attack.

There is a double-standard in operation, and it is purely political.

(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)




 

LSHS Class of 1977

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My old buddy Phil Underwood came to town Friday, and we got to hang out for a few hours, going out to eat pizza and then visiting with my youngest son and his bride. Phil and I graduated from Lithia Springs (Ga.) High School in 1977, and I hadn’t seen him in nearly 40 years.

Phil’s late father was pastor of the Lithia Springs Church of God, and Phil used to invite me to go to church with him, which was something of an educational experience for a Southern Baptist boy, because Church of God is what is known as charismatic — speaking in tongues, faith healing, etc. — or, as most folks call them, “holy rollers.”

As a preacher’s kid (“PK”), Phil got into a little bit of teenage rebellion, but nowhere near the level of juvenile delinquency of most of my childhood friends, so my folks liked him. We both played trombone in the school band until Phil got kicked out of the band at the end of our freshman year because he went riding in a dune buggy with some girls during a band trip to Florida. There was great irony in the fact that Phil was expelled from band while I, a genuine criminal, was not.

For many years, Phil was pastor of a church in Gwinnett County, Georgia, but since has become a consultant and motivational speaker and now lives in the Florida Keys where his neighbors include former Dallas Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson. Phil recently published a book, New Every Morning: 30 Days of Reflections on the God Opportunities in Each Day, which you can (and obviously should) buy from Amazon.

Our visit gave us a chance to share old stories, and for me to explain to Phil how I went from working in a warehouse on Fulton Industrial Boulevard to being a local newspaper reporter and then, eventually, becoming such a nationally notorious person. Like the old hippie song says, what a long strange trip it’s been. And meanwhile . . .

Tonight, our blog’s resident aggregator and troll-smasher Wombat will be in town, and will be a special guest on The Other Podcast with John Hoge and Dianna Deeley — 7 p.m. ET — don’t miss it!