A 19-year-old college student is in custody in San Diego after a Sabbath-morning shooting rampage at a synagogue in suburban Poway, California. Police say John T. Earnest killed one person and wounded three others at the Chabad Community Center, after posting a 4,000-word manifesto online in which he blamed “international Jewry” for “sealing the doom of my race.” The son of a high-school science teacher, Earnest also apparently hated Muslims, claiming responsibility for an arson last month at a mosque in Escondido, about 9 miles from the synagogue he attacked with a semi-automatic rifle Saturday.
In his manifesto, Earnest says he was inspired by a man who attacked a synagogue in Pittsburgh last year, and by last month’s massacre of Muslims in New Zealand. Skimming through his manifesto, and glancing at details of Earnest’s background, I was deeply disturbed: Here is a smiling, handsome young man with so many obvious advantages who, nevertheless, appears to have been radicalized by the Internet in the span of a few months. “If you told me even 6 months ago that I would do this I would have been surprised,” Earnest wrote in his manifesto, which made reference to various online forums. He had apparently been reading these message boards since 2017, and developed an obsessive hatred of Jews, whom he called a “squalid and parasitic race.”
Discussing this on “The Other Podcast” Saturday with John Hoge, I expressed dismay at this situation. When I was a teenager 40 years ago, there were a lot of things to be bummed out over, but nobody was shooting up synagogues. Mainly we were smoking weed and listening to rock-and-roll music, which might not have been the healthiest response, but it was at least more fun than Jew-hating and mass murder.
Somehow, I suppose, liberals will find a way to blame Trump for this, which is no less crazy than this kid’s blame-the-Jews nonsense.
Two headlines splashed across adjoining pages of the Wall Street Journal this week underscored a desperate but largely uncommented-on challenge facing America. “Red Ink Seen for Social Security by 2020,” screamed one, as the program’s outlays will exceed income next year — and its trust fund will be insolvent by 2035.
And directly to the right: “High Court to Take Up LGBT Rights,” discussing three Supreme Court cases that will determine whether the 1964 Civil Rights Act covers sexual orientation or gender identity.
What links these headlines?
Simply this: Social Security is going broke because we’re in a slow-motion demographic train wreck. As Chief Actuary Stephen Goss put it back in 2011, “Lower birth rates are the cause of (the) substantial and permanent shift in the cost of Social Security as a percent of GDP from 2008 to 2040.” America’s total fertility rate hit the lowest rate ever recorded in 2017 at just under 1.8 children per woman in her lifetime. The stork’s been in free fall since 2010 — and baby-making is cratering in particular among women 20-29, prime reproductive years.
It gets worse. The Journal coverage estimated that old age benefit shortfalls will “account for 90% of larger budget deficits.” Wonder why America is patrolling the seas with a deteriorating fleet half its size compared to the 1980s? Why there’s no money for infrastructure? Or why, despite the Trump boom, we may return to economic secular stagnation?
Dare one paraphrase the 1992 Clinton campaign watchword? “It’s the fertility, stupid!”
So why the plummeting birth rates? Largely, according to Lyman Stone of the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), because marriage in America is in critical condition.
Stone writes that fertility among married women in 2016 remained above 4.0 per woman across child-bearing years. Yet “a smaller proportion of women are married during (their) peak-fertility years.”
In my experience, when you try to talk to young people about this problem, what you get in response are economic arguments — they can’t afford to get married and have children, they say. However, this argument is easily rebutted by the observation that, first of all, marriage itself costs nearly nothing. My wife and I will mark our 30th anniversary Sunday. On April 28, 1989, we went to the courthouse in Gordon County, Georgia, and were married by Probate Judge Johnny Parker, with two of our friends in attendance as witnesses. You don’t need a big expensive ceremony to get married and, proverbially, “two can live as cheaply as one.” Furthermore, very poor people have more babies on average than do the college-educated middle class, so that income and assets are inversely correlated to fertility. Thus, the claim that young people can’t get married and have children because of their economic circumstances is exposed as a self-justifying rationalization.
When our eldest daughter was just a baby, my father came to visit my wife and I at our tiny little roach-infested rental home in Calhoun, Georgia. When I complained about our difficult financial circumstances, Dad laughed and said, “Son, if you wait to have children until you can afford to have children, you’ll never have children.” So true!
We ultimately had six children — our youngest is a high-school sophomore, while the oldest three are married with children of their own — and we have been struggling financially the whole time. A family like ours is only possible for those who reject a prejudice I call “middle-classism,” where people’s imagination of what is possible is limited by concern for material wealth and social status. If you believe children must live in a “good neighborhood” with “good schools” (these phrases are a sort of code, if not indeed a racist dog whistle), then you will find yourself within those those imaginary limits. On the other hand, if you believe children are a blessing from God, you will have more babies and figure some way to survive despite economic adversity. And you might be surprised to discover that, whatever the financial disadvantages or loss of social status your family experiences by rejecting the prejudice of “middle-classism,” your children actually do quite well in life.
However poor a large family may be (in relative terms, given the general affluence of American society), if you inculcate good values in your numerous children — especially a strong work ethic — they may well accomplish great things in life, far exceeding their more privileged peers who have fewer siblings but more social status. Religious belief is strongly correlated with high fertility, and it is not surprising that U.S. fertility has declined as atheism has flourished. I have often remarked that liberals, who never hesitate to declare their commitment to Science™ — particularly Darwinism, but also such totems of the intelligentsia as “climate change,” gender theory, etc. — generally seem to be failures at the basic biological task of procreation, whereas us ignorant Bible-thumpers are winning by Darwinian terms.
Those who speak of “overpopulation” tend to think of people as statistics — interchangeable units, without any individual value — and this dehumanizing conception fails to take into account the differences in human quality. However equal we may be, in terms of our basic rights, some people are more valuable to society than others. If you consider yourself a person of superior quality, as liberals obviously do, isn’t it logical to assume that you would be a superior parent? Your children would not only inherit whatever genetic advantages you might pass along to them, but also they would also benefit from being raised under your wise guidance and, it also logically follows, your children would grow up to be very worthwhile members of society. Yet liberals don’t act in accordance with this logic, instead preferring to avoid parenthood altogether, or else having just one or two children.
Whatever else might be said in favor of larger families, the need for future taxpayers ought to be something everyone could agree on, but instead we seem to be drifting toward fiscal catastrophe because of what Bob Maistros calls our “slow-motion demographic train wreck.”
According to the Washington Post, you are a far-right extremist if you think blowing up a church on Easter Sunday is . . . I don’t know, wrong or something. So apparently, it’s now OK to blow up churches, because only extremists would object. The headline here could have been:
They don’t want you to be angry, even though they know you have things to be angry about. They want you to be ashamed, all the time, for disagreeing with them about, well, anything. Meanwhile they want to keep their own base angry and inflamed 24/7. News spin revolves around this to a huge degree.
"To some, it was further proof that Christians in many parts of the world are under attack."
The Washington Post is playing the typical media game: downplay the Islamist violence directed at Christians and Westerners while remaining singularly concerned about possible future “backlash” against Muslims . . .
The pace of this game has accelerated. It used to be that the media would spend a day or two at least noticing that Islamists had murdered a bunch of people again before claiming The Real Crime is any possible hypothetical speculative future side-eye a woman in a hijab might get at Wal-Mart.
Now, they start claiming that Muslims Are the Real Victims here while they’re still gathering up the limbs sheered off of the victims.
What the liberal media have done with Islam, really, is an updated version of what they did with Communism during the Cold War. According to liberals, the greatest danger facing America circa 1950 was not Stalin or Mao; no, the real danger was “McCarthyism.” Don’t worry about those totalitarians with nuclear weapons pointed at us, said the liberals, what should seriously concern Americans is that a high-school teacher in Brooklyn or a screenwriter in Hollywood might lose his job for joining the Communist Party: “What about their civil rights?” And after it was pointed out that there were no civil rights under Communism — no free speech, no free press, etc. — the liberals next switched to the game of shouting “Fascist!” at anyone who made such a point. Anyone who seriously opposed Communism was always compared to Hitler by liberal smear merchants, who accused every prominent anti-Communist — from Richard Nixon to William F. Buckley Jr. to Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan — of being “paranoid” or having an “authoritarian personality.”
The Left never learns any new tricks, they just go back to the same predictable playbook — character assassination, guilt by association, moral relativism, etc. — and expect to get away with it, as if no one could ever be clever enough to reverse-engineer their racket.
At least 156 people are dead in an Easter Sunday terrorist attack targeting Christians in Sri Lanka after eight explosions ripped through high-end hotels and churches as suspected suicide bombers blew themselves up.
The initial six explosions injured as many as 500 people, including Japanese and British citizens, and 35 foreigners — from the UK, US, Netherlands and Portugal — are among the dead, sources say.
Reports now indicate a seventh explosion in the southern Colombo suburb of Dehiwala — which killed two people — and an eighth in the northern suburb of Orugodawatta, which killed three police officers during a house search.
Sri Lanka’s police chief had made a nationwide alert 10 days before today’s bombings, warning that Islamic extremists planned suicide bombings at ‘prominent churches’, sources say, but it is not yet clear who is responsible for the attacks — and no one has claimed responsibility.
Britain’s High Commissioner to Sri Lanka James Dauris said: ‘We understand that some British citizens were caught in the blasts but we are unable to say how many people are, or might have been, affected.’ . . .
State minister of defence Ruwan Wijewardene said investigators have identified the culprits behind the ‘terrorist’ attacks, and those responsible were religious extremists who would be taken into custody ‘as soon as possible’.
The choice of “high-end” hotels as targets was aimed at Sri Lanka’s flourishing international tourism industry. The former British colony of Ceylon is an island off the south coast of India. The beaches of Sri Lanka now have many resort hotels catering to sun-seeking travelers.
Support for the terrorist Hamas regime in Gaza and demonization of Israel were major themes of a three-day conference last month at the University of North Carolina entitled, “Conflict Over Gaza: People, Politics and Possibilities.” Peter Reitzes of The Tower reports:
The large lobby area served as the central gathering place with vendor tables and catered snacks. It featured a large screen that played a photo collage on repeat, celebrating and glorifying Palestinian terrorism against Israel. Conference attendees continually saw photographs of Palestinians attacking Israel with incendiary devices . . .
Nowhere were there photographs of Israeli children hiding and crying in shelters as rockets from Gaza exploded around them.
There was a table with hundreds of free conference t-shirts that prominently said “Gaza,” which conference staff were busy folding and handing out. There were hundreds of free tote bags, as well, with regular announcements throughout the day to get your free gear. . . . When the UNC and Duke Consortium for Middle East Studies applied for and received a federal grant through the Department of Education (DOE) worth $235,000, I wonder if the federal government imagined that free Gaza “swag” was part of the plan.
There was a “UNC Student Stores” bookstore setup with more than 20 titles that shared central themes of anti-Israel and Hamas apologetics. . . .
The book store attendant informed me that the Conference Director chose the books being sold at the event.
You can read the rest of that, as well as Part 2 and Part 3 of Reitzes’ report on the conference at UNC, including the fact that conference organizer Shai Tamari forebade attendees to record the proceedings. So they sent the bill to U.S. taxpayers, but U.S. citizens cannot be allowed to see what they paid for? Jew-haters don’t want any video cameras around to record them avowing support for Islamic terrorism, I guess.
That headline from the Washington Times reports a remarkable interview that Mayor Pete Buttigieg gave Kirsten Power, in which the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate said:
Ann Althouse calls this “an interesting look at his idea of reluctance,” and indeed, such a comment contains many layers of irony. As true as it is that an egotistical celebration of “wealth and power” contradicts “the teachings of the Christian faith,” that faith has other teachings toward which the South Bend mayor has been rather less observant.
Turn with me, brothers and sisters, to the first chapter of the Apostle Paul’s epistle to the Romans, beginning with verse 18:
Paul goes on to describe the sins of pagan Rome under the reign of the Emperor Nero, saying that “even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind” (verse 28) an ungodly attitude which manifested itself in “vile affections” (verse 26).
This text describes how the idolatrous Romans “became vain in their imaginations” (verse 21) and with what consequences: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (verse 22).
Now, it is not my purpose here to defend President Trump from his critics, for certainly he is capable of defending himself. Rather, I ask whether Mayor Buttigieg exemplifies that willingness “to humble yourself before God,” a failure for which he condemns the president.
Having often contemplated the text of Romans 1:18-32, and having studied also the biography of the Emperor Nero, it has often seemed to me that the Apostle Paul — who wrote that epistle while at Corinth, and thus almost certainly had no knowledge of the wickedness transpiring in the imperial court — must have written in the spirit of prophecy.
Of Nero’s hideous decadence, the historian Cassius Dio says: “He came to believe that anything that it was in his power to do was right, and gave heed to those whose words were inspired by fear or flattery, as if they were utterly sincere in what they said.” Among his many other depraved cruelties, Nero ordered his own mother murdered, divorced his first wife, Octavia, and then ordered her execution, and kicked to death his second wife while she was pregnant. After that, Nero became infatuated with a teenage boy named Sporus, had him castrated, and “used him in every way like a wife.” Anyone familiar with Romans 1:18-32 must see that the Apostle Paul’s catalog of “unrighteousness” manifested as “vile affections” could be read as a condemnation of Nero, and some have speculated that this may have inspired Paul’s subsequent execution.
How this is relevant to Buttigieg’s criticism of Trump, atheists are as free as any Christian to form their own opinion. It seems to me, at least, quite shocking that Buttigieg should claim authority to lecture others about “the teachings of the Christian faith,” and I think that most other Christians will share my astonishment at this. Furthermore, it is interesting that Kirsten Powers should be the amanuensis through which Buttigieg’s theological sermon is delivered. As Betsy Rothstein of the Daily Caller points out, Powers once dated Anthony Weiner and so her judgment about men and morality is rather suspect. Powers seems impressed with Buttigieg’s $7 million first-quarter fundraising total, but in fact Buttigieg and the other 2020 Democrat hopefuls are not doing very well by historic standards. At this point in 2008, the three top Democrats — Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards — had raised a combined $66 million, whereas the top four Democrats in this cycle — Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke and Buttigieg — have raised a combined total of less than $47 million.
‘Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus,
Just to take Him at His Word.
Just to rest upon His promise,
Just to know, “Thus saith the Lord!”
Many years ago, I spoke at a national Christian home-schooling conference and my speech was more political than religious, addressing the issues of liberty involved in educational freedom. During the Q-and-A afterwards, I was asked: “How does your faith affect your political views?” Having not anticipated such a question, I was silent for a moment before answering: “I think it’s about that ‘Thou shalt not steal’ thing.”
From there, I went on to explain how the fiscal action of the Welfare State amounts to theft on a grand scale, taking money from the people who earned it and giving it to other people who didn’t. This is immoral, and our participation in this immoral system corrupts us. The government school system is a huge part of this corruption. Whereas the Bible commands parents to teach their children, Americans have outsourced this duty to government, and the education of our nation’s children is entrusted to bureaucrats whose loyalty is to the system that employs them, rather than to the parents whose children are being taught.
Perhaps I rambled on for 10 minutes in that vein, but my point is how that question made me think of something simple: “Thou shalt not steal.”
That’s not my rule. That’s God’s rule.
Part of what has gone so badly wrong in our educational system over the past half-century is that the ideology of self-esteem has completely suffused itself into the curriculum and pedagogy. Quite the opposite attitude inspired my old-fashioned teachers, who frequently punished as impudence my own excessive “self-esteem.” Back in the day, children were expected to be silent and obedient, and I was loud and disruptive, and my teachers were united in a determination to suppress my exuberance by the most direct and forcible measures.
None of my teachers gave a damn about my “self-esteem,” or else I would not have been paddled so regularly, and sent out into the hallway to write 500 times: “I will not talk in class,” etc. However much I resented this harsh treatment at the time, in retrospect I am grateful to have been among the last generation of American children who were taught with old-fashioned discipline, before the cult of self-esteem took hold in teachers’ colleges and utterly ruined our educational system.
“Self-esteem” is an ideology that values emotion over reason, and tells people that our feelings are more important than facts. Furthermore, the cult of self-esteem tends toward a denial of mankind’s sinful nature and thereby fosters atheism or, when self-esteem ideology seeps into religious teaching, results in an antinomian tendency that turns Christianity into a sort of gooey, effeminate, feel-good emotionalism.
“For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” — Christian belief begins with the confession that we are sinners, helpless without God’s grace, and in need of the atonement of Christ. If we don’t believe that our sin condemns us, we have no need of a Saviour, and thus the suffering and death of Jesus was in vain, nor are we dependent on God’s continued mercy. You see how the cult of self-esteem, which tells us we are naturally good people, and therefore deserve to feel good about ourselves, is antithetical to Christian belief. “Self-esteem” begets a neo-Gnosticism that can be found everywhere now in popular culture, as in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker, on his final run at the Death Star, hears the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi: “Luke, trust your feelings.”
What happens when people ignore God’s law and trust their feelings?
The Battle of Stalingrad was the largest and bloodiest battle in all human history. The Soviets lost nearly half a million men killed in this epic battle, while losses in the Axis army (including not only Germans, but also troops from Italy, Hungary and Romania) amounted to nearly 800,000 killed, wounded and captured. All of this bloodshed between two totalitarian armies resulted from the godless evil that arises when nations reject divine law and trust instead in human ideologies.
What inspired this lengthy examination of moral theology was something to which Mark Tapscott called attention: Christian evangelist Ravi Zacharias was speaking at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014, and a young man asked this question:
“Why are you so afraid of subjective moral reasoning? Do you think we all are just going to start raping and pillaging just because we don’t have a book telling us what to do?”
Do you perceive the “self-esteem” required to ask such a question? When we know what happened in history — there are still people alive who survived the Battle of Stalingrad — we know very well what atrocities are possible if “we don’t have a book telling us what to do.” However, Christians don’t think of the Bible as merely a book, but rather an expression of the mind of God. As wretched sinners, we understand that our own “subjective moral reasoning” is infinitely inferior to the perfection of the Creator of the universe, which is why the old hymn speaks with pleasure of trusting His judgment: “Thus saith the Lord!”
It is a sinful sort of “self-esteem” that makes people think they don’t need the Word of God, but are qualified to substitute their own preferences — their “subjective moral reasoning” — for divine law. In this sense, they impudently assert their authority to stand in judgment of God.
A sinful people, full of such “self-esteem,” will endorse a government that disregards God’s law (e.g., “Thou shalt not steal”) and will also soon do away with “Thou shalt not kill.” Had that young man at the University of Pennsylvania read The Black Book of Communism? Does he know how many millions of people were murdered by Marxist-Leninist regimes in the 20th century? We recoil in horror to think of the bloodshed at Stalingrad, where the two armies lost in a single battle about twice as many men killed as the U.S. lost during the entire war. But even that dreadful death toll was a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of millions who died under Stalin’s dictatorship, and the even larger number killed by Mao’s murderous regime in China.
Answering the young man’s question at Penn, Ravi Zacarias made mention of this bloody history and said: “We killed more people in the 20th century than in the previous 19 put together.” Watch:
As horrible as the 20th century was, my fear is that we are headed toward even greater evils in the 21st century, simply because so many young people are so puffed-up with “self-esteem.”
That tweet by Colorado leftist Saira Rao perfectly encapsulates the problems of the new Democrat majority in the House. Nancy Pelosi wanted to pass a resolution — obviously aimed at Ilhan Omar — condemning anti-Semitism. But this has failed, because the Left has welcomed Jew-haters into their ranks, and anti-Semitism is particularly prevalent among radical “women of color” (WOC, in social-justice shorthand) like Linda Sarsour. On elite university campuses now, the anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement unites radical students and, not incidentally, serves as a Trojan Horse for anti-white racism. What is meant, after all, by BDS rhetoric condemning Israel as an “apartheid state”? Conservative Jews like David Horowitz and William Jacobson have been warning about this tendency for years. When you see Nancy Pelosi linked to David Duke (!!!) in left-wing rhetoric, you see how serious this threat is in Democrat politics.
Democrats have had the majority in the House of Representatives for just two months, but they’ve already been sidetracked by an ugly divide over anti-Semitism and other bigotry.
For weeks, tensions on Capitol Hill have been rising over remarks from freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota questioning the allegiance of Israel supporters in Congress. Her comments drew condemnation from many of her fellow Democrats and prompted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California to push for a vote on a resolution condemning anti-Semitism. Rather than putting the issue behind them, however, the move has prolonged the controversy and put a spotlight on divisions inside the party around a highly sensitive issue.
The resolution came after Omar criticized politicians by using anti-Semitic tropes, prompting condemnation from several Jewish Democratic lawmakers and an apology from Omar last month. But Omar later dug in when she suggested pro-Israel interests pushed members of Congress to pledge allegiance to a “foreign country,” drawing further outrage from her colleagues.
Pelosi had a choice: She could issue piecemeal condemnations and hope the issue disappeared, or nip it in the bud with a strong resolution staking out the House’s stance on anti-Semitism. She chose the latter but didn’t count on the resistance from allies of Omar. After an ugly scrum broke out on Wednesday behind closed doors, the vote was tabled. Leadership is now rewriting the resolution to condemn all hate, not just anti-Semitism.
Members from both the Congressional Black Caucus and the younger, far-left wing of the party were furious about the leadership’s gambit. They questioned singling out Omar for condemnation. What about bigotry from Republicans, including President Donald Trump? And why were Democrats so focused on a woman of color, one of just two Muslims in Congress? Could the added scrutiny even put Omar in danger?
“Like some of my colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus, I am concerned that the spotlight being put on Congresswoman Omar may put her at risk,” California Sen. Kamala Harris told reporters Wednesday. Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — who like Harris are running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination — also voiced their support for Omar.
Others on the left asked why Democrats were condemning only bigotry against Jews. “We think that hate and racism in our country is growing. American Jewish, LGBTQ, Latino, immigrant, Muslim — it is something that needs to be looked at as a whole instead of just trying to come up with a hierarchy of hurt and pain,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, another freshman Democrat and the other Muslim in Congress, told CNN on Wednesday.
So, Democrats can’t condemn anti-Semitism because, without anti-Semitism, they’d lose “the younger, far-left wing of the party” — the Jew-haters who support Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
In case I haven’t reminded you lately, some of my cousins are Jewish Democrats. They despise Donald Trump, but I wonder: How long will they be able to maintain their anti-Trump stance if Pelosi fails to suppress the Jew-haters in her coalition? You can go back as far as the 1960s and see how this poisonous weed has grown on the Left.
Anti-Israel politics functioned as a proxy for anti-Semitism among “Black Power” radicals, and anti-Semitism was a proxy for anti-white racism. In 1996, I interviewed a former activist for SNCC who bemoaned how “Stokely Carmichael and that crowd ran the white people out of the movement” circa 1966. That tendency flourished again in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and, while it seemed to fade during the Obama years, it continued growing with the BDS movement on college campuses. Now, with Trump in the White House and Democrats controlling the House, Pelosi finds herself yoked to this radicalism and it will be difficult, if not impossible, for her to disentangle herself from the anti-Israel/anti-white sentiment that flourishes among “the younger, far-left wing of the party.”
