“Great is the power of memory, a fearful thing, O my God, a deep and boundless manifoldness; and this thing is the mind, and this am I myself.”
The words are from the Confessions of St. Augustine, one of the founding documents of Christian theology. Augustine understood that, to a large extent, what we remember is who we are. In some sense, our soul is a story, the story of our lives.
In our modern world, numerous novels and movies have explored the interwoven fabric of memory and identity. Amnesia thrillers, like The Bourne Identity, Mr. Buddwing or Mirage follow a protagonist’s attempt to recover his memory so he can find out who he is, a hero or a villain, a wise man or a fool. Philip K. Dick’s short story We Can Remember it for you Wholesale, filmed twice under the title Total Recall, tells of a working stiff who discovers that his memories are implants and he is more of a man than he ever dreamed of being. Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind follows various characters as they discover they have had their most unpleasant memories erased, so that not only their selves but their relationships are called into question. Most recently, Dan Erickson’s Apple TV series Severance makes the point by opening its memory drama with the essential question: “Who are you?”
The meld of memory and identity means that new information about the past can change the answer to that all-important question. In real life, the most dramatic cases are often traumatic. Consider the soldier who makes enormous sacrifices in war, and then later comes to understand that that war was fought for wicked or corrupt purposes. Consider the wife who devotes her life to her husband, and after his death discovers that he was consistently untrue. I have known such people. They feel their whole lives have been revealed to be a lie, and that the truth has stripped them of their sense of who they are. In order to go on living fully, they have to forge a new understanding of their own identities.
But, of course, in a slower, more subtle way, our sense of self is always changing as each new day adds new meaning to what we remember. A period of great hardship and repeated failure, for instance, can be transformed into a saga of hard work and dedication after it has led to some tremendous breakthrough or success. An embarrassing or absurdly comical first date can become the meet-cute romance of “how I met your mother,” after it leads to marriage and gives rise to new generations. Where you felt like a loser or a fool in the moment of experience, you now look back in memory and see yourself, to paraphrase Dickens, as the hero of your own life.
In my own life, one of the most remarkable examples of this memory-and-self transformation came after I wrote The Great Good Thing, a memoir of my journey from secular Jew to faithful Christian. When I was writing the book, I thought it was the story of how the harsh instruction of experience and my own commitment to moral logic taught me to transcend my upbringing, my skeptical social milieu and the default atheism of the age. 
But when I reread what I had written, I received something of a shock. It was plain to see that Christ had been present on every page of the story, even going back to my earliest childhood. Often his presence was hilariously obvious. A teacher who appeared at an important moment had been named Krist — spelled Christ. A nurse who comforted my wife and me in a period of crisis — a nurse I thought I recognized but had never actually met — was named Christiano. Indeed, virtually every voice that had spoken to me in moments of decision was, I now realized, a Christian voice or the voice of a person with a name that made reference to Christianity. It was so remarkably plain to see that only the most doggedly stubborn materialist mind — a mind like mine — could have missed seeing it while it was being lived.
Once I did see it though — once I saw that Christ was there even when I did not believe in him or recognize him — my entire understanding of my autobiography began to change and with it my sense of who I am. The revelation of Christ’s presiding presence cast a transformative backward light on my often troubled youth. I came to see that even when I suffered cruelties and abuses, scarring trauma and a broken heart, I was simultaneously being molded by an unseen but loving hand.
Today, six years after I published my memoir, my entire relationship to my childhood has changed. I see my life now as a work of creation — not mine — a work in which all things, even the most painful, are turned to beauty if I submit myself to the spirit that shapes me. This in turn has given me a fresh vision of myself not as the subject of my life but as the object of constant artistry and care, a rather less lovely Galatea imbued by a far greater Pygmalion with more and more abundant being.
So it is with Easter and all the world. In the Friday darkness after the crucifixion, nothing was left to Jesus’s followers but a history of failure, the bitter memories of false hope and the gargantuan reality of death.
“The One sent by God was dead,” writes the great theologian Joseph Ratzinger, once the great Pope Benedict XVI. “There remained only a complete void. There was no longer any answer.” It must have felt to them as it often feels to us now when we watch the news unfolding at home and abroad.
Then, all at once, it was wholly otherwise. The tragic memory was rewritten by an event so unexpected and uncanny even those closest to it couldn’t see it right away. Mary Magdalen stood just beside her risen Lord and did not know him until he spoke her name. Thomas had to stick his finger in the man’s wound before he could comprehend him. Some of those who saw him even in the moments before his ascension to Heaven continued to doubt what they had seen. It was as if their minds could not let go of what they knew in order to know more. 
On the road that led out of Jerusalem to the nearby town of Emmaus, two broken-hearted disciples met their savior on the way and did not recognize him. It was only later, when he broke bread with them, that they realized who he was. But in the time between their meeting and that moment of recognition, this man explained to them how the world’s past, from creation onward, would now be remembered differently. The memory of mankind would change and so the identity of mankind would change. All the meanings of the past would be rewritten by this fresh revelation, and those who saw the transformed face of history would themselves become new.
God walked beside me my whole life, but I could not see him until he spoke my name, and then my memory and my self were forever altered. Likewise all of us and all our lives seem sometimes sunk in godless dark. 
Yet every Easter, God speaks to us again.
Andrew Klavan’s latest book is <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Truth-Beauty-Englands-Greatest-Understanding/dp/0310364612">The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England’s Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus</a>.

Easter

Memory, Identity, Easter

Culture

Readers Pass

Religion

The following is an exclusive excerpt from The Truth And Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England&#8217;s Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus, by Andrew Klavan, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Truth-Beauty-Englands-Greatest-Understanding/dp/0310364612">available now</a>. 
What happens if we choose not to point ourselves back toward Eden? What happens if we decide that the original experience of creation—flesh and spirit united—was all a fraud, a random accident of the evolutionary brain, a social construct, a false consciousness? That we’re just meat puppets animated by chemistry and nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so?
That choice—that decision to cease to believe in God’s moral universe—is dramatized in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. In Macbeth, the movie of God’s good creation is played in reverse. Instead of Eve being drawn out of Adam so that the interplay of masculine and feminine can bring both into full humanity, Lady Macbeth removes her femininity—“Unsex me here!” she cries—in order to draw her husband out of his humanity altogether so that he might murder his way to the throne of Scotland.
Macbeth and his lady choose to unexperience the moral order, to sever their connection with the Logos and redefine morality from God’s good to their own desires. “For my own good,” Macbeth says, “all causes shall give way.”
Lady Macbeth cannot quite extinguish her inner awareness of God’s truth: her conscience. After engineering a spate of murders, she goes mad, trying to wash an imaginary spot of blood from her hand.
But something different happens to Macbeth. In pulling away from God’s meaning, he finds he is left with no meaning at all. Near the end of the play, when he hears of his wife’s death and as he faces death himself, he declares his nihilism:
<blockquote>Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.</blockquote>
Shakespeare knows this speech is absurd. Macbeth is a player on a stage, and his story not only does not signify nothing, it can’t signify nothing. Even if it signifies that life is meaningless, it has that meaning, and so negates its own message. We’re back to the old problem of all such relativist philosophies: if there is no truth, how can it be true that there is no truth? If there is no meaning to life, how can the story of life mean there is no meaning? The human mind is a meaning-making machine, and it matters whether we find that meaning in collaboration with reality or step out of that collaboration and find ourselves left with nihilistic nonsense.
That is the point of the speech. Macbeth has chosen to separate himself from the Logos. Like Milton’s Satan, he thought he had the power to transform evil into good and hell into heaven, but he could only transform himself into evil, and his soul into its own hell.
He forgot that man’s experience of life—from the sound of a falling tree to beauty and truth—is a cocreation, a collaboration with God’s reality. It is that or it is worse than nothing, it is nothingness.
Which brings us back to the question, How do we know when the creation of our minds is a legitimate cocreation, a collaboration with reality? How do we know our beauty is really beauty and our truth is really truth?
Coleridge found the answer in Jesus. “Might not Christ be the World as revealed to human knowledge?” he asked. “A kind of common sensorium, the total Idea that modifies all thoughts?”
The word sensorium means the apparatus of human sensation, the way in which we experience the world. Coleridge’s idea is that Christ is the model and perfection of that experience, a true melding of flesh and spirit, life and Logos, man and God. The more we experience the world through Christ, the more we become like Christ and know the world truly. This is what Paul was describing when he said, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”
“In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
This is the Gospel of John. This was the faith of Coleridge. He believed in a creator God who expressed his will through the Logos and so made man and nature—man-and-nature, which were one thing, all alive together—and imbued nature with meaning, beauty, and truth that man could discover through the living model of the Logos, Christ. He believed that the human imagination is “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.”
We are, each of us, the eighth day of creation.
Andrew Klavan is an award-winning writer, screenwriter, and media commentator. An internationally bestselling novelist and two-time Edgar Award-winner, Klavan is also a contributing editor to City Journal, the magazine of the Manhattan Institute, and the host of a popular podcast on DailyWire.com, The Andrew Klavan Show.

Klavan

We Are More Than Flesh And Blood

My favorite Christmas song written in anything like the modern era — after songs like Silent Night, I mean, Hark the Herald Angels Sing and Adeste Fidelis — is Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. It was first introduced by Judy Garland in the 1944 film “Meet Me in St. Louis.” At first, Garland and her soon-to-be-husband, director Vincente Minelli, turned the song down because it was too depressing. Lyricist Hugh Martin made the necessary changes, but the song remains a sorrowful one. “Have yourself a merry little Christmas… next year all our troubles will be miles away… until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow.”
It was appropriate to the time. The world was at war. Many “faithful friends who are dear to us,” were themselves miles away, many in mortal danger. After the war, when Frank Sinatra recorded the best version of the song, the lyrics were reworked again. The “muddle through” line was ditched. &#8220;The name of my album is A Jolly Christmas,” Sinatra told Martin. “Do you think you could jolly up that line for me?&#8221;
But still, the song retains its wistfulness. That’s what I like so much about it. It has the feeling of a joy expected but out of reach.
That’s, of course, as appropriate to this year as it was to the year it was written — this awful year when so many have lost their jobs, lost their hope, and lost their lives while those of us who survive are so angry and divided we can barely tolerate our neighbor, let alone love him.
But more than that, a wistful sense of a joy expected but out of reach is really at the heart of every Christmas season, even in good times. “Joy,” C. S. Lewis once wrote, “is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.”
The reason for this is that every consolation we seek in life — sex, love, beauty, money, pleasure, power — is only a poor representative of something beyond itself. Those who dedicate their lives to pursuing the symbol rather than the thing the symbol represents invariably end up disappointed — or worse.
In a 1990 column in the Village Voice — often quoted by preacher Tim Keller — Cynthia Heimel wrote of the misery of so many celebrities she had known in their youth, saying they “wanted fame. They worked, they pushed and the morning after each of them became famous they wanted to take an overdose. Because that giant thing they were striving for, that fame thing that was going to make everything OK, that was going to make their lives bearable, that was going to provide them with personal fulfillment and happiness had happened and they were still them.”
That thing we want — that thing the riches of the world can only represent — that thing that seems so near and yet so maddeningly out of reach — is the love of the God who made us in his image, the only real North Star of our life’s journey, the only true guidepost to becoming the person we were made to be.
On the first Christmas, that longed-for something broke the barrier and came onto our earthly plain. When we celebrate the day, we boldly declare our faith in the reality of that event and the truth of its meaning: God is truly there for us. We are not yearning in vain.
Maybe, in this year of anger and pain, when we all have to muddle through somehow, it would be good to remember that the people we disagree with most, the people we hate most, the people we want to throttle most are desperately yearning too, suffering too, and striving for a thing they can’t quite reach. And many of them may not have our hope, our Christmas faith.
Jesus did not tell us to love our enemies — or our neighbors for that matter — because he thought it would make them better people or the world a better place. He told us to do it, “so that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.”
To love like that is to taste in this vale of tears the vale beyond, the thing we long for. Because that is the reality that this reality can only half express: God loves you — the Left and the Right, the black and the white, the straight-laced and the freaky: his image every one.
So have yourself a merry little Christmas. Because that far-away joy is more real than all our troubles, more real than all the world.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Nativity

Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas

Christmas

Jesus Christ

The New York Times, a former newspaper, has launched an attempt to restore the career of master journalist and bater Jeffrey Toobin.
Toobin, a New Yorker writer and CNN Legal Analyst, was suspended from both jobs after he was caught with his pants literally down, roobin his toobin during a Zoom call with other left-wing journalist colleagues, some of whom use the pronouns she and her — because they’re women.
The toobin-roobin Toobin is apparently exempt from the me-toobin movement because of all his great left-wing journalism, like the time he knocked a girl up who wasn’t his wife and then tried to stiff her on the child support payments.
His other left-wing journalism includes relentlessly attacking Donald Trump’s morals and yanking his crank during a Zoom meeting.
The writers at the New York Times have sympathy for Toobin because they also practice left-wing journalism, though hopefully they do it off-camera, in the privacy of their own homes.
Indeed many at the Times believe that after all the great left-wing journalism Toobin did at the New Yorker, he shouldn’t be penalized just because he did it once when ladies were present.
The question is: if Jeffrey and his Toobin are to be allowed to work again, what job would be suitable for a man who plays with himself on camera?
One idea is that he might become a Legal Analyst at CNN. He could think of the Zoom call as a sort of audition.
Or he could become Louis C. K.’s opening act.
Or he could run for governor of New York, kill thousands through pure incompetence, then write a book about how great he is and win the Emmy for best Jeffrey Toobin.
But whatever is next for the toobin-roobin Toobin, I think we’ve all learned an important lesson. One should always treat women with respect and perform sexual acts only with consent — unless you’re a left-winger. Then all bets are off and you can put your toobin anywhere you like.
More satire from Andrew Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/democrats-are-make-believe-furious-over-attack-on-jill-bidens-absurd-doctor-title-satire">Democrats Are Make Believe Furious Over Attack on Jill Biden’s Absurd Doctor Title</a>

Toobin

Times Tries To Restore Jeffrey Toobin’s Career After He Committed Left-Wing Journalism On Zoom [Satire]

Jeffrey Toobin

Satire

Democrats continue to pretend to be outraged at a Wall Street Journal op-ed that said Jill Biden should not call herself doctor merely because she’s not a doctor.
Biden spokesman Phil Hokum declared, “I have never pretended to be this outraged in all my life. To say that Jill Biden should not be called a doctor just because she has a PhD in some non-existent science I can hardly name out loud without laughing is the lowest form of sexism and should be make-believe offensive to all privileged white women without anything better to worry about. I am so fake angry I can barely get the words out in a convincing tone of voice.”
Strange-tasting soda Doctor Pepper also protested, saying, “I want to register in the strongest possible terms just how offended I’m pretending to be. If an expert in a field that by all rights shouldn’t even exist can’t be called a doctor, then all I can say is I’m just a can of carbonated sugar water with a weirdly unidentifiable taste that’s really not as bad as you thought it was once you get used to it.”
Spiderman Supervillain Doctor Octopus also said he was pretending to be insulted by the op-ed.
In a CNN panel discussion with the usual bunch of brainless nudnicks, Doc Ock said, “For the Biden administration to succeed, we cannot have journalists saying true things like this. If people are going to start randomly stripping undeserved Doctor titles off our names, then I’ll just become Octopus. Do I look like an octopus to you? All right, I sort of look like an octopus, but I’m so much more than that when you really get to know me.”
Doctor Evil, Doc from the Seven Dwarves and Doctor Love — who’s got the potion and the emotion — also feel Jill Biden should keep her title even though they conceded she can’t be a very good doctor or Joe Biden wouldn’t look like he does.
More satire from Andrew Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/democrats-order-holiday-shut-downs-to-stop-dangerous-spread-of-christianity-satire">Democrats Order Holiday Shut Downs to Stop Dangerous Spread of Christianity</a>

Doctor Octopus

Democrats Are Make Believe Furious Over Attack on Jill Biden’s Absurd Doctor Title [Satire]

Jill Biden

Joe Biden

Democrat governors continue to shut down their states and cities in the hope they can bring virus levels down to where they are in Florida, where everything has remained open. Democrats say that Covid-19 — or as it’s sometimes called the Chinese Flu or the Kung Flu or the Commie Whommy or the I Don’t Feel Swal-Well…
What was I saying?
Oh yeah.
Democrats say that the Red Death is a particular threat at Christmas time because families and friends might gather together to worship the only son of the living God and realize that virtually everything the Democrats believe is a hideous perversion of the design of the Creation and then vote the Democrats out of office en masse.
To prevent the dangerous spread of Christianity, Democrats say they must ban outdoor dining, indoor eating, making money, having opinions and loving anyone who is not in government.
Plus churches must be demolished, preferably in the middle of services.
In New York City, Mayor De Blasio told reporters, “I do understand New Yorkers like Christmas a lot, but the mayor, who lives just north of Brooklyn, does not. The mayor just hates Christmas, the whole Christmas season. Now please don’t ask why, no one quite knows the reason.”
The Mayor was then taken to the hospital to be treated for a heart that’s two sizes too small.
In California, Governor Gavin Newsom says he will prevent dangerous Christmas gatherings by flying on his leathery wings above the city and shooting fiery rays from his pitchfork at anyone trying to enter a church, gather in prayer, worship silently while sitting alone or failing to sacrifice a child to a fifty foot golden statue of Baal that looks remarkably like Governor Gavin Newsom.
In Minnesota, Governor Ubersturmfuhrer Gretchen Whitmer said she would try to make Christmas lockdowns fun by adapting the annual tradition in which NORAD tracks the flight of Santa’s sleigh on Christmas Eve.
This year, Whitmer says, they’ll also shoot him down.

California Governor Gavin Newsom And Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf Speak On State’s Actions On Homelessness Crisis

Democrats Order Holiday Shut Downs to Stop Dangerous Spread of Christianity [Satire]

Thomas Jefferson famously wrote: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Unfortunately, we now have the former. Lots of government. Almost no news media worth the name at all.
The growing Hunter Biden scandal may eventually expose the alleged decades of influence peddling by the Biden family, but it has already exposed a stunning level of corruption and dishonesty among the scoundrels formerly known as American journalists.
The New York Post began running stories about Hunter’s suspicious business dealings — and father Joe Biden’s possible involvement — in mid-October with the election in full swing. They had obtained Hunter’s laptop which, they said, was also in the hands of the FBI. Tucker Carlson followed up with an hour-long interview with businessman Tony Bobulinski, who described his meeting with Joe Biden to discuss a deal with a Chinese energy firm that was a front for the Chinese Communist Party.
The news media acted in unison to minimize and hide the news from its audience until the election was over.
When President Trump brought the matter up, CNN’s Nicole Wallace cut into his remarks and said, “We hate to do this really, but the president isn’t telling the truth.”
“There is no evidence Joe or Hunter Biden did anything wrong,” was repeated by so many outlets so often that the Media Research Center was able to weave together a hilarious montage of one anchor handing the lie off to another.
When the dam continued to break and evidence of wrongdoing grew worse, the media changed their tune. The entire story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign, they said — again in unison. This, despite the assurances of Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe that no one in the intelligence community believed this was so.
And, of course, Big Tech joined in on the censorship with Twitter banning the Post for days on the bogus claim that Twitter did not allow leaked information on their platform. They had had no problem when The New York Times received leaked information about Trump’s tax returns. When they were forced to change their policy in the face of their blatant hypocrisy, Jack Dorsey demanded the Post remove the story because it violated the previous policy so that they could then retweet it under the new policy.
In an MRC poll, 36 percent of Biden voters said they weren’t aware of the corruption story. Thirteen percent — 4.6 percent of the total Biden vote — said they would not have voted for Biden if they had known. That could have been enough to change the outcome.
Now that the election is safely won by Biden, the news is out: Hunter is under FBI investigation in part because of his dealings with China, and with the laptop as part of the evidence, just as the <a href="http://www.apple.com">Post</a> reported.
The media has moved directly from suppression to gaslighting. The New York Times is reporting the story as “newly disclosed,” and unctuously suggests that the investigation is a Trump hit job — even though Attorney General William Barr followed Department of Justice guidelines and kept the investigation secret until the election was over.
This is the same newspaper that can’t understand why conservatives don’t believe them when they run a headline like: “The Times Called Officials in Every State: No Evidence of Voter Fraud.” This is the same news media that is appalled when conservatives don’t believe them when they tell them to wear masks or stay indoors because of the Chinese pandemic.
We don’t believe them because they are liars. The Hunter Biden story proves it.
This country is in an information crisis. A small elite with a wholly unearned confidence that they should be instructing rather than informing us has destroyed our trust in the normal channels of information. Our news organs are so corrupt that we have no way to pluck the facts out of their lies, distortions, and suppressions. Conspiracy theorists are now as plausible as The New York Times — not because the theorists have gotten any more honest, but because the Times isn’t honest at all.
Donald Trump made tremendous inroads in exposing news media outlets for the frauds they are. But we need either to reform American journalism entirely or build an honest competition that will leave them in the dust where they belong.
Jefferson was right that “newspapers without a government” is preferable to “a government without newspapers.” But a government without newspapers is what we have, and if that continues to be true, we will not remain free.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Burning newspaper

KLAVAN: The Information Crisis

2020 Election

Hunter Biden

Media Bias

A new dating app for Democrats offers them a chance to meet delightful, sensual Chinese girls who love to take long walks and share secrets.
The app, called Bang Bang Fang Fang, is available free to Democrat members of Congress, college professors in the hard sciences, those working in the defense industry and anyone with a view of the Pentagon and a telescope.
An ad for the app says, “There are almost 1.4 billion people in China, and even with all the aborted baby girls, that still leaves a lot of hot Asian babes just raring to meet a well-connected Democrat like you.
&#8220;These lonesome, submissive darlings want to cater to your every whim while you pour out your heart to them about your important work on the House Intelligence Committee or at the weapons plant, just to give a couple of random examples.
“Nothing turns these women on like a real man’s man who can understand those complex subjects a mere girl can’t comprehend, like engineering or international business legislation or the placement of weapon caches and military installations.
“Just listen to the ecstatic praise from these satisfied — and we do mean satisfied — customers.
&#8220;‘Wow!’ says Congressman Eric Swalwell, ‘If you think Dan Dan Sichuan noodles is a hot Chinese dish, wait till you get a load of the hot Chinese dishes on offer on the Bang Bang Fang Fang dating app. These girls will breach your Great Wall and make a beeline for your Forbidden City, if you get my drift. And more than that, they’re really good listeners too.&#8221;
&#8220;Hunter Biden agrees, and says, ‘In the fast-paced world of high finance, it’s important to be able to make connections and I can really connect with a sweet little Chinese number who is impressed by what an important person I am, especially now. With Bang Bang Fang Fang, I can really make out, even after paying ten percent to the Big Guy.’
&#8220;So download the Bang Bang Fang Fang dating app today. It’s available wherever Democrats are sold.”
More satire from Andrew Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/biden-addresses-pandemic-with-bold-new-plan-trump-has-already-completed">Biden Addresses Pandemic With Bold New Plan Trump Has Already Completed</a>

Eric Swalwell

New Bang Bang Fang Fang Dating App Matches Hot Chinese Babes With Highly Placed Democrats [Satire]

China

Chinese Communist Party

President-Pretty-Much-Elect Joe Biden has announced his dynamic new plan to address the pandemic.
Biden, who campaigned for president by hiding in his cellar and wearing a mask, says he will recommend that all Americans hide in their cellars wearing masks until they too become president, then all the presidents can come out together and walk arm in arm into a bold new future of hiding in the cellar wearing masks.
Biden says he will reverse the horrible pandemic policies of President Trump by encouraging American companies to develop the vaccine that was developed under President Trump.
Biden will then mobilize the government agencies Trump mobilized in order to implement the distribution plan implemented by President Trump in order to get the Trump vaccine to the people Trump has arranged to get it to.
By doing this, Biden says, he will overcome the irresponsible programs of the Trump administration by doing what they’ve already done while the news media congratulates him on his brilliant new plan that was Trump’s plan, and cheers at how much better Biden’s Trump plan is then Trump’s Trump plan because it is much less disruptive than Trump’s plan by being exactly the same so that nothing needs to be changed.
Furthermore, whereas President Trump refused to implement an unconstitutional nationwide lockdown because he was too busy with his plan to develop a vaccine that made an unconstitutional lockdown unnecessary, President-More-or-Less-Elect Biden will implement the unconstitutional lockdown which will not be necessary because of the vaccine and so will not be implemented because it’s unconstitutional.
Finally, in order to inspire Americans to do what’s right, Biden will wear a mask and hide in the basement until the vaccine is delivered or it’s naptime, whichever comes first.
Biden says he believes his absolutely new plan that is Trump’s plan will save the lives of hundreds of thousands of 90-year-olds although it may be difficult to tell whether their lives were saved or not.
The news media’s response to Biden’s announcement was unanimously dishonest and corrupt.
More satire from Andrew Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/in-delightful-self-satirizing-performance-art-dr-birx-says-we-know-precisely-what-to-do-to-stop-surging-virus-satire">In Delightful Self-Satirizing Performance Art, Dr. Birx Says ‘We Know Precisely What to Do’ To Stop Surging Virus</a>

Biden Addresses Pandemic With Bold New Plan Trump Has Already Completed [Satire]

Coronavirus

COVID-19

Donald Trump

A woman wearing a mask who claims to be Dr. Deborah Birx but, let’s face it, could be anybody, recently commented on the current surge in the Chinese Flu or the WuFlu or the Kung Flu or the Chicom Flu or the Andrew Cuomo Death Bug, as it is known among terrified New York old people.
The alleged Dr. Birx – who claims to be the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator but may not even be Dr. Birx let alone the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator – said, and this is a real quote, “Only we can save us from the current surge, and we know precisely what to do.”
When reporters asked the putative Dr. Birx to elaborate on what precisely we precisely know precisely to do, she said:
“We must wear the masks we didn’t have to wear but now should wear though they won’t protect us if they’re worn beneath the nose or above the mouth or over the face, though that may protect your grandmother who, of course, is already dead if she lives in New York State.
&#8220;Then we must shut restaurants unless they are serving rich people and stop celebrating any holiday that suggests there is a spiritual power in the universe higher than your local public officials.
&#8220;Those who are already ill must die alone in order to discourage others from going outdoors where there is no danger of catching the virus unless you are indoors and wearing a mask which would be useless in that situation.
&#8220;Everyone must stay at home except those delivery people who have to bring us our food while we move large amounts of cash into each other’s bank accounts via Zoom conference calls, and of course, governors who need a night on the town.
&#8220;If we precisely follow these precise instructions to perform what we know precisely are the precisely correct actions, we will die like flies, but at least the economy will collapse.”
Thank you, Dr. Birx — if that’s who you are.
More satire from Andrew Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/in-hilarious-comic-masterpiece-nyt-editor-tweets-paper-will-treat-biden-as-they-did-trump">In Hilarious Comic Masterpiece, NYT Editor Tweets Paper Will Treat Biden As They Did Trump</a>

President Trump Holds News Conference In White House Briefing Room

In Delightful Self-Satirizing Performance Art, Dr. Birx Says ‘We Know Precisely What to Do’ To Stop Surging Virus [Satire]

Dr. Deborah Birx

What struck me — and I think a lot of people — about actress Ellen Page’s announcement that she was now a man named Elliot was the po-faced self-seriousness with which the media accepted the lunacy. She’s a man, but she’s queer, but she’s with a woman, because she’s a lesbian, only she’s a man lesbian. Right-ho! Let’s get to work changing the credits on her old films because this is leftism, after all, and history itself has to be erased and rewritten to reflect the current nonsense.
Listen, when it comes to other people’s sex lives, I agree with Ebenezer Scrooge: &#8220;It&#8217;s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people&#8217;s. Mine occupies me constantly.” But this anti-gender stuff is truly bah, humbug.
For the vast majority of us, the differences between the two genders are a source of pleasure, fascination, and consolation. The Left and their awful entertainment and news media have done everything they can to reduce these differences and these pleasures to one difference and one pleasure: the difference between our bodies and the pleasure our bodies feel during sex.
But no. The mesmeric attraction of the feminine for the masculine and vice versa is as deep and as wide as anything in nature. Speaking personally, my chief joy in a long happy marriage — above even sex, children, companionship, and meals that don’t come out of a box — has been the slow realization that, as a man, I was seeing only half the world. Loving a woman over time has been like putting on a pair of 3-D glasses, one lens blue, one pink. The world acquires dimension.
The joy of gender difference is written into every free civilization. Women don’t have to dress differently than men. We don’t have to use different bathrooms. We don’t have to allow society to reflect our different life choices. We do it because we like to. Because we are fearfully and wonderfully made and we want to live that out and celebrate it.
And yes, of course, nearly all men and women have traits usually attributed to the other sex. But that doesn’t change what they are. Men cannot be feminine, only effeminate. Women cannot be manly, only mannish. Possessing the traits of another gender doesn’t turn you into that gender, any more than possessing a cowboy hat turns a New Yorker into a Texan.
Are there features of gender that are unfair? You bet — which makes gender exactly like every other aspect of human life. There is only one thing in our experience that is equally distributed: death. Everything else — talent, beauty, intelligence, health, luck, even time — are doled out to us with arbitrary hilarity.
For most of us, though, the gender dynamic is a compelling, confusing, intoxicating, troubling, spectacular delight. It is at the very core of being alive. The Left’s attempt to vacuum this central pleasure out of existence in the name of faking equality tells us one thing: they are unhappy people at war with creation.
Somewhere between two to six percent of people are homosexual. Somewhere between two to six people are transgender (I’m joking — but the real numbers are vanishingly small). As with most things, these people have it harder than those in the norm. Being different leaves one open to exclusion and bigotry and other forms of cruelty.
I’m willing to risk my career and reputation here and come firmly down on the side of not being cruel to people. By golly, I’ll go further than that and say we ought to be as kind to one another as we can. There, I’ve said it, and I’m glad! But no, I’m not going to pretend to rewrite reality so that the sorrows of a few can vanish into the misery of everyone. I’m not going to pretend that the words man and woman should be redefined. I’m not going to call a woman he or a man she. Maybe one day you’ll be able to change everything down to your chromosomes, but as I write, women can’t become men, and men can’t become women, not even by mutilating their bodies to turn them into a flesh-costume of the opposite sex.
I know it is easy for comfortable people to say life is unfair — but life is unfair, nonetheless. You can’t make it fair in any way but by crushing the great to make them equal to the small. You cannot make the unhappy happy. You can only make all the world sad to accommodate them.
I won’t. Live your personal life out as you will, and God love you. But don’t ask me to lie about the nature of creation.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Screening And Q&A Of “Janis: Little Girl Blue”

KLAVAN: For The Vast Majority, Gender Difference Is A Joy

Ellen Page

Gender

Leftism

Transgender

Actress Ellen Page has declared that she is no longer a woman who likes women but is a man who is gay but likes women because she’s a woman but says she’s a man, which is something only a woman would be crazy enough to do, except she’s a man — she says.
From now on, her pronouns will be “Who?” “Never Heard of Her,” and “What Else is On?”
The media immediately pretended to believe what Page was saying, rewriting every reference to her to use her new name Eliot, and even suggesting they would go back to her old movies, which include Juno and other films besides Juno, and rewrite her credits as if she had not only become a man today but had been a man back when she was a woman.
This is the media’s way of telling us that we should all now live at the sanity level of Hollywood actresses who, as a group, fall on the sanity line in the narrow space between People Who Talk to Venus on Broken Cell Phones and Hollywood Actors.
From now on, Miss Page will celebrate becoming something she isn’t by acting as if she were what she’s not. So in order to be a man, she will now be canceled for playing a woman on TV when in real life she’s a woman playing a man, which is cultural appropriation. Or blithering nonsense.
From now on, she will also sit in an easy chair while her girlfriend is cleaning the house and occasionally shout out to her, “Hey, honey, could you bring me a sandwich?”
Her girlfriend, a lesbian, says she will continue to live with her now that she’s a man even though she likes women because, come on, don’t be silly, she’s obviously a woman, just look at her.
Scientists say they’ll work around the clock to discover how Page suddenly switched her sex by thinking about it. Or maybe they’ll just break for lunch, then forget the whole thing.
More satire from Andrew Klavan: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/biden-plans-to-change-trump-policies-and-put-america-eighth-satire">Biden Plans to Change Trump Policies and Put America Eighth</a>

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Andrew Klavan