A new CNN documentary traces the &#8220;activation&#8221; of Christian nationalists in the United States back to the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, suggesting that Kirk&#8217;s message — and his subsequent murder — had &#8220;radicalized&#8221; American Christians into believing that they are being &#8220;persecuted.&#8221;
CNN anchor Pamela Brown announced the project exposing &#8220;Christian Nationalism,&#8221; which she said she&#8217;d been working on for several months, and framed the documentary as an investigation into a perceived threat against the United States.
WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
CNN&#8217;s Pamela Brown announces she&#8217;s been working on a &#8220;special project&#8221; warn against &#8220;Christian nationalism&#8221; and portrays them as a radicalized threat to the country.
She then launches into a report where she fears the assassination of Charlie Kirk uniting Christians and scoffs… <a href="https://t.co/1J63ta6EIO">pic.twitter.com/1J63ta6EIO</a>
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) <a href="https://twitter.com/NickFondacaro/status/2023785142230122696?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 17, 2026</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
&#8220;For the past several months, I&#8217;ve been working on a special project, examining the growing influence of Christian Nationalism in America,&#8221; Brown explained. She went on to describe Christian Nationalism as an ideology unto itself that was rooted in the &#8220;belief&#8221; that the United States was founded to be a &#8220;Christian nation&#8221; and as such, should reflect &#8220;Christian values&#8221; in its laws and institutions.
Brown then said that her documentary started with Kirk&#8217;s assassination: &#8220;Experts say it was a pivotal moment for the movement, and an occasion where the tragedy of his loss unified Christian nationalists and the Trump administration as they honored him.&#8221;
After a brief clip of President Donald Trump&#8217;s remarks at Kirk&#8217;s memorial service, Brown added, &#8220;Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist and prominent Christian nationalist, was assassinated. It became a rallying call for those who believed in his message &#8230; and it was a call to action.&#8221;
Brown then cut to comments from Matthew Taylor, of the Georgetown University Center of Faith and Justice, who said, &#8220;[The] memorial service was one of the most potent examples of this shift in our culture that we&#8217;re experiencing right now, where a large segment of American Christians are being activated by these ideas, radicalized by these ideas that say that they are the persecuted ones and that they need to stand up for Christians rights.&#8221;
In a second clip, Taylor suggested that there was something insidious in President Trump&#8217;s promise to &#8220;protect Christians.&#8221;
&#8220;Trump has never explicitly said he believes the country should be a Christian nation,&#8221; Brown added. &#8220;But he is aligned with Christian nationalists and wants their support, and after an assassination attempt during his campaign, Trump said he believes God saved his life so he can lead the country.&#8221;
TPUSA&#8217;s Andrew Kolvet responded to the coming documentary on Tuesday, saying, &#8220;Consider this: so CNN does a piece — talking about the radicalization of people at Charlie&#8217;s memorial. Charlie was assassinated by a radical, by somebody that was animated, at least in part, by his love affair with somebody that was trans. And instead of burning down the country, like the real radicals did, we held vigils and memorials, and people bought Bibles, and they got baptized.&#8221;
&#8220;How is that a bad thing? What are we even talking about here?&#8221; he asked.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-media-max-width="560">
CNN BACKLASH IS MOUNTING: They just announced a documentary covering the &#8220;rise of Christian Nationalism&#8221; in America, and it&#8217;s not going how they expected it to go.<a href="https://twitter.com/AndrewKolvet?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@AndrewKolvet</a> let the TRUTH about America&#8217;s spiritual revival and the role Charlie Kirk has in it:
&#8220;Consider this:… <a href="https://t.co/moi2PwF17c">https://t.co/moi2PwF17c</a> <a href="https://t.co/isO2nt4bHi">pic.twitter.com/isO2nt4bHi</a>
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) <a href="https://twitter.com/GuntherEagleman/status/2023828795958964451?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 17, 2026</a></blockquote>
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Presidential Candidate Donald Trump Addresses Turning Point USA Summit

CNN Doc Suggests Charlie Kirk Assassination ‘Activated’ Christian Nationalists

assassination

Charlie Kirk

Christian Persecution

Christians

Judeo-Christian Values

Media

Politics

On Thursday, President Trump returned to the National Prayer Breakfast and proceeded to give a speech that was reasonably religious in overtones.
Something fascinating about the president is that he&#8217;s been able to do things that a lot of Christian conservatives and religious Jews appreciate while maintaining a largely secular coalition.
What would appear to be a marginal increase in non-Christian affiliation inside the Republican Party is not marginal because the overall loss in the traditional religious constituency in the Republican Party is reflective of an overall loss of religiosity in the American public more generally.
Today, the majority of Republicans are religious, but an increasing percentage are not particularly religious, and it is pretty religiously diverse.
That does not mean that the Republican Party should somehow abandon the moral issues that make the Republican Party the Republican Party. That&#8217;s not my case.
My case is that making the Republican Party non-ecumenical as opposed to ecumenical is a mistake. We’ve seen this sort of move being made on behalf of some parts of the sort of the trad-Catholic Right, some of the quasi-integralists on the Right, who seem to be making a move to break up the Republican coalition by suggesting that there is a vast religious revival that is happening in the country that is going to drive Republicans to victory.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2363-sub?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Those numbers do not exist. I wish there were; I wish there were a vast religious revival in the country and that the Republican Party was closer to its biblical moral values. I wish that were the case.
But that is not supported by the data, which is why Trump is the right president for this moment, and it&#8217;s why Republicans have to watch out for coalition building and how not to break it up.
When you talk about the increasing irreligiosity of the body politic, that is correct. That doesn&#8217;t mean that Republicans should abandon social issues. They absolutely should not.
But it does mean that the more overt you are about marginal social issues, the more you are likely to lose the Trump coalition. Trump is winning outsized shares of Christian evangelicals, Catholics, and religious people because the Left is crazy, not because he is campaigning as some sort of religious figure.
If you wish for Republicans to win, then presenting good policy with a moderate face — even if you have outsized rhetoric like President Trump — is a better path to victory than embracing the fringe positions taken by so many on X and elsewhere.
President Trump can go to the National Prayer Breakfast and give what are, at best, sort of vague religious statements. And that&#8217;s fine with people. President Trump literally joked about making it to heaven at the National Prayer Breakfast, saying:
I said, “I’m never going to make it to heaven. I just don’t think I qualify.” I don’t think there’s a thing I can do, but all of these good things I’m doing, including for religion — you know, religion’s back now hotter than ever before — but I said, “Even though I did that, and so many other things” —  I named things. I said, “I won’t qualify. I’m not going to make it to heaven.”
And the New York Times did a front-page story that Donald Trump is questioning his life and the meaning of his life. No, I was just having fun. I really think I probably should make it; I mean, I’m not a perfect candidate, but I did a hell of a lot of good for perfect people.
That last line, that he&#8217;s done a lot of things for people, is the reason he’s been elected president twice. 
President Trump says, listen, you have to believe in something. You have to have a religion in general. 
This is the American position. The American position is that Biblical values are good and that we like religious practice in this country. Freedom of religion and freedom from government intervention in religion are in the same amendment for a reason. That broad ecumenism is a winning approach for the Republicans.
And pointing out the anti-religious secularism of the Left is a winning approach for Republicans.
President Trump has the pulse of the American people on the vast majority of issues, which is why he usually takes the 80% on 80/20 issues.
Republicans need to continue to do that.

US-POLITICS-RELIGION-PRAYER-BREAKFAST-TRUMP

The Big Tent: Trump’s Ecumenical Path To Victory

Ben Shapiro

Bible

Christianity

Donald Trump

Jews

Opinion

Prayer

Religion

Republican Party

White House

When my parents sent me to college at age 16, they were naturally nervous. But their nerves were calmed by the fact that I would be attending a Christian school — a school that avowed the same beliefs and values as they did.
As it turns out, that shouldn’t have reassured them.
According to a <a href="https://studentsforlife.org/2026/01/13/shocking-1-in-7-faith-based-schools-connected-to-abortion-industry/">stunning new report</a>, more than 1 in 7 Christian colleges directly violated their professed faith in the 2024-2025 school year by maintaining a relationship with Planned Parenthood or the abortion industry. That’s fully 1 in 7 colleges publicly proclaiming Christ while privately violating the most basic Christian value: the dignity of life.
That’s not counting the myriad of colleges that plaster the name of Christ on top of an otherwise completely secular school. The study, conducted by Students for Life of America’s Demetree Institute for Pro-Life Advancement (IPA), only looked at schools directly affiliated with a Christ-centered denomination — schools that publicly affirmed faith in their mission statement.
Nor were the schools’ infractions minor in nature. More than one-fourth of the offending schools were Christian schools that referred students to Planned Parenthood as a “health resource.”
That fact would be distressing even if the schools in question were secular. Reports from outlets as left-wing as the New York Times document the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/us/planned-parenthood-clinics.html">abysmal standard of care</a> at Planned Parenthood facilities, including staff instructions to limit appointments to just 10 minutes in order to churn through as many patients as possible.
But for Christian schools, such referrals don’t just pose a threat to student health; they’re a direct betrayal of the faith they proclaim.
Students, parents, and donors expect schools bearing the name “Christian” to live out their faith. But IPA’s report shows just how many fall short of that calling.
And unfortunately, the problem is only growing. According to IPA, Christian schools have increased their support for abortion by 19.82% overall since the 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade. Since 2024, that support has increased by a full 38.63%.
And while some might seek to dismiss the problem as limited to a single rogue denomination, that’s simply not the case. IPA eliminated from its study schools belonging to denominations that have affirmed abortion — like the Disciples of Christ, Quakers, and Moravians. Even after eliminating those denominations, IPA found that over half the remaining denominations — those that have not expressed support for abortion — had at least one school with ties to abortion.
Clearly, the issue is not one that can be avoided by simply attending a school from a different denomination. For Christian pro-lifers seeking an education aligned with their values, the future seems grim.
But fortunately, the news isn’t all bad. According to IPA’s report, a full 50 ties between Christian schools and Planned Parenthood were severed during the 2024-2025 school year, thanks to interventions and awareness fostered by IPA. And after researchers reached out to offending schools in July 2025, four schools cut all ties to the abortion industry, and another four removed some.
This success points to the path forward. Higher education institutions depend on the support of students, parents, alumni, and donors. If these groups express undeniably—with their words and, if necessary, their pocketbooks—that they will not stand for compromise, Christian colleges will have no choice but to cut ties with the abortion industry or to stop falsely claiming the name of Christ.
I’m thankful that the school I attended, The Master’s University, a small Christian college north of Los Angeles, lives out its professed faith. Notably, it received an “A” rating in IPA’s report — meaning no ties to Planned Parenthood/the abortion industry were found. But the same should be true of all schools claiming Christianity.
If a student decides to attend a Christian school, they should know exactly what they’re getting: a school that affirms biblical truth, starting with the simple reality that every human life is sacred.
* * *
Mary Mobley is a press specialist and online editor at Students for Life.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

US-VATICAN-RELIGION-POPE-UNIVERSITY

New Study: Planned Parenthood Has Quietly Invaded Christian Colleges

Abortion

Christian Colleges

Dobbs

Planned Parenthood

Pregnancy

It&#8217;s Christmas break, so it seems like an appropriate time <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-251222-member-exclusive?elementPosition=3&amp;row=2&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">to discuss</a> one of my favorite books: “The Screwtape Letters,” by C.S. Lewis.
The book is all at once a deep rumination on religion, a high comedy rooted in the hilarity of both humanity&#8217;s flaws and Satan&#8217;s foibles, a tragedy about the nature of death, and a tale of redemption and everlasting life.
It is a spectacularly good book.
When you read “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Screwtape-Letters-Deluxe-C-Lewis/dp/0063487764/?_encoding=UTF8&amp;pd_rd_w=hmHqX&amp;content-id=amzn1.sym.048a6e3c-8d40-4302-8312-26c626af6738%3Aamzn1.symc.050ea944-f1cf-4610-b462-3b604f2f4082&amp;pf_rd_p=048a6e3c-8d40-4302-8312-26c626af6738&amp;pf_rd_r=KNCVRDB5MGRR1B4K95QR&amp;pd_rd_wg=iizDa&amp;pd_rd_r=4e52d04f-0a0b-4d38-95e4-749c6da85b95&amp;ref_=pd_hp_d_btf_ci_mcx_mr_ca_id_hp_d">The Screwtape Letters</a>,” there are a lot of truly funny moments. Lewis himself said, though, “Of all my books there was only one I did not take pleasure in writing,” calling it ‘dry and gritty going.’ &#8220;At the time, I was thinking of objections to the Christian life and decided to put them in the form ‘That’s what the devil would say.’ But making goods ‘bad’ and bads ‘good’ gets to be fatiguing.”
The book is wildly entertaining because he is obviously writing in the voice of one of Satan&#8217;s minions. In Christian theology, Satan has a will of his own, and he&#8217;s rebelling against God, which makes him a really fascinating character.
Lewis opens the book with a couple of epigraphs, one by Martin Luther: “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield the texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn,” and one by Sir Thomas More: “The devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.”
The book is written from the perspective of Screwtape as letters to his nephew, Wormwood. Wormwood has been given the on-the-ground task of convincing a young man away from his incipient Christianity and Screwtape’s job to advise Wormwood on the best way to procure the young man&#8217;s soul.
This gives Lewis extraordinary leeway to stick and move with Satan, to make fun, to mock, to play with the entire idea. And what emerges is a great work of literature.
There are a bunch of large-scale arguments that Lewis makes in “The Screwtape Letters.” The first one is that Satan&#8217;s best weapon is the “real world.”
That is correct.
If you talk to secular people, they&#8217;ll always say that the spiritual world and God are unreal. The real world is the material world. But then, when you ask them about what&#8217;s important to them, they&#8217;ll talk about their feelings, which, of course, are inherently unreal in the same way the spiritual world is unreal.
This is a point that Lewis makes: the definition of “real” is capacious and changing on a regular basis among secularists. Lewis believes that man&#8217;s draw to the divine can be rooted in reason, and that reason actually guides you toward something beyond yourself. It guides you toward the transcendent.
That&#8217;s an idea that I heartily agree with. I believe that the notion of free will and free choice in the universe guides you toward the idea that there must be something beyond us, that there&#8217;s a logic to the universe that guides you to the question of questions: Who is the Chief Logician, who made the rules?
<div id="attachment_1018735" style="width: 391px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Screwtape-Letters-Deluxe-C-Lewis/dp/0063487764/?_encoding=UTF8&amp;pd_rd_w=hmHqX&amp;content-id=amzn1.sym.048a6e3c-8d40-4302-8312-26c626af6738%3Aamzn1.symc.050ea944-f1cf-4610-b462-3b604f2f4082&amp;pf_rd_p=048a6e3c-8d40-4302-8312-26c626af6738&amp;pf_rd_r=KNCVRDB5MGRR1B4K95QR&amp;pd_rd_wg=iizDa&amp;pd_rd_r=4e52d04f-0a0b-4d38-95e4-749c6da85b95&amp;ref_=pd_hp_d_btf_ci_mcx_mr_ca_id_hp_d"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1018735" class="size-large wp-image-1018735" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/71NsTMMQuGL._SL1500_-381x576.jpg" alt="Credit: HarperOne" width="381" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/71NsTMMQuGL._SL1500_-381x576.jpg 381w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/71NsTMMQuGL._SL1500_-199x300.jpg 199w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/71NsTMMQuGL._SL1500_-768x1160.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/71NsTMMQuGL._SL1500_.jpg 993w" sizes=" (max-width: 381px) 100vw, 381px" /></a>Credit: HarperOne</div>
Lewis makes the same point, and then he says that the job of the secular materialist is to get you to focus on the thing-in-itself.
Screwtape says,
<blockquote>Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it real life. Don&#8217;t let him ask what he means by real.</blockquote>
Thus, keep the person focused on the immediate and the now. There&#8217;s nothing that&#8217;s done this more than the internet age, where our attention spans have been reduced to the next 15 seconds. Sitting and ruminating on life leads you to higher ideas, and if you can prevent people from doing that sort of stuff, you end up with a very materialistic society.
So what exactly does reality mean? According to Screwtape,
<blockquote>People ought to be taught that in all experiences which can make them happier or better, only the physical facts are real, while the spiritual elements are subjective and in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them, the spiritual elements are the main reality, and to ignore them is to be an escapist.</blockquote>
The idea is that when you&#8217;re thinking about death, the only thing that is real is the death itself. You&#8217;re not supposed to look at the spiritual element of death. Or, if you do look at something that makes you very happy, you&#8217;re not supposed to look at the spiritual element of what makes you very happy. Instead, focus on the pure materialism of the thing. The goal is to enmesh mankind in the world.
Screwtape says,
<blockquote>How disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death with which war enforces. One of our best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered useless in wartime. Not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever.</blockquote>
The material world, then, is the chief ally of Screwtape because people desire not to think of God. God is a distraction. God has obligations. God has duties. 
Screwtape says,
<blockquote>Human beings hate every idea that suggests Him just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a passbook. (meaning a checkbook.)</blockquote>
The idea is that if you&#8217;re not thinking about duty, and then you&#8217;re forced to think about duty, you don&#8217;t like it very much.
The other thing that Screwtape tries to get you to focus on is the future — at all times. If you can focus on the future at all times, then people will be very neglectful of the present.
So says Screwtape,
<blockquote>It&#8217;s far better to make them live in the Future. &#8230; The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time — for the Past is frozen and no longer flows and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought like Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism or Communism, which fix men&#8217;s affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence, nearly all vices are rooted in the future.</blockquote>
The idea is, if you&#8217;re thinking about the future, then you&#8217;re not thinking about the spiritual consequences of the things you do in the here and now. You&#8217;re thinking about the material consequences of the things that you do in the here and now, and that allows you to do bad things in the name of a “better future.”
Screwtape says the best thing you can do is convince people that their utopian thoughts are the things that are mandated by God. So on the one hand, you try to get people sunk in reality, and this drives them away from God.
On the other hand, Screwtape advises Wormwood that people should be led to examine their own emotions constantly; if you can be narcissistic, checking yourself all the time, you&#8217;re going to end up without God.
Lewis teaches that very often in life, we engage at the beginning of a task with great enthusiasm, and then the enthusiasm wears away. This happens all the time with a variety of tasks, and once that happens, that is when you encourage people to look into being morose, look into being depressed, to reject the spiritual aspect of their duty, to stop trying to take joy in the spiritual aspect of what they&#8217;re doing, and instead focus on the fact that it&#8217;s just sheer drudgery.
Screwtape says that the rule of thumb for seducing mankind away from God is to encourage people to be unselfconscious when considering sin — to be unabashed, unashamed, blasé about your sin, but to be self-conscious and awkward when you consider acts of faith.
This is modern society in a nutshell. The more you sin, the prouder you should be. You should engage in festivals celebrating your sin. When it comes to going to church, you should be shy: “I don&#8217;t want to be judgmental; I&#8217;ll make you feel ashamed. But when it comes to my sin, man, I will tell you about my sins all day long because we can all be comfortable; we can be the boys when we&#8217;re talking about our sins.”
Screwtape also points out that one easy way to hell is to get people to disregard the individual human beings in front of them in the name of Mankind, writ large. This, obviously, is the project of the Left, which is willing to completely run over its neighbors in order to pursue a &#8220;better world&#8221; for everybody else.
The book has wonderful pieces of advice, even for people who are not totally religious, about how to act better in your inner world, how to treat other people better, and how to have better relations with your spouse.
It&#8217;s a beautifully written book.
* * *
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CS Lewis writing

One Of My Favorite Books: ‘The Screwtape Letters’

One Of My Favorite Books: 'The Screwtape Letters'

Books

C.S. Lewis

Great Britain

Literature

World War II

The following essay originally appeared on Andrew Klavan&#8217;s Substack, &#8216;<a href="https://thenewjerusalem.substack.com/p/the-age-of-willful-ignorance" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The New Jerusalem</a>.&#8217;
Oklahoma’s top education official has ordered the state’s public schools to teach the Bible. State School Superintendent Ryan Walters says, “The Bible is an indispensable historical and cultural touchstone. Without basic knowledge of it, Oklahoma students are unable to properly contextualize the foundation of our nation.”
The mandate set off a wave of near-hysteria among establishment elites. The New York Times called it an “extraordinary move that blurs the lines between religious instruction and public education.”
But no. Superintendent Walters is fully in the right. Indeed, his statement doesn’t go far enough.
The fact is, you cannot understand the West without thinking about God and the Bible. You cannot understand Western man or Western history, Western literature, art, or philosophy, without considering them in the context of faith.
This is true whether you believe in God or not. Human beings act on certain basic drives and instincts. If you don’t acknowledge and account for those drives and instincts, you can’t understand what humans are trying to do and why. If you don’t know human motives and desires, you can’t make sense of human actions or see into people’s inner lives. History, culture, politics, even personal relationships become little more to you than a meaningless jumble of facts and events.
<div id="attachment_757393" style="width: 522px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-757393" class="wp-image-757393 size-full" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/07/Klavan-II.jpg" alt="Wikimedia. Colin. The 12 Paisley Abbey gargoyles that were replaced in 1991. The set includes &quot;see no evil&quot;, &quot;speak no evil&quot;, &quot;hear no evil&quot; and an &quot;alien&quot;." width="512" height="167" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/07/Klavan-II.jpg 512w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/07/Klavan-II-300x98.jpg 300w" sizes=" (max-width: 512px) 100vw, 512px" />Wikimedia.</div>
This is basic common sense. People want to live and thrive. You can’t begin to understand them without examining the pressures of survival that form their priorities. People are driven to mate and reproduce. You can’t understand women without considering their maternal instincts. You can’t understand men without parsing the nature of their sexual longings. It makes no difference that your Aunt Matilda hates children or your Uncle Ned never looked at a woman. Even those experiences must be understood in the context of the norm. This is not an imposition of societal values. This is the way things work.
After the desire to live, which is common to all creatures, perhaps the most basic human desire — the most human human desire — is the desire for happiness.
“Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim,” writes Aristotle in the &#8220;Nicomachean Ethics.&#8221; The good, he goes on to say, “is generally agreed to be happiness,” because happiness is an end in itself. And he adds: “Happiness is an activity of soul in accordance with perfect virtue.”
Through all of Western history, and most certainly in that portion of Western history dominated and shaped by Christianity, the form of virtue has been understood in relation to the will of God. This means that the central human drive for happiness is inseparably linked to faith.
“All men seek happiness. This is without exception,” wrote the great 17th century scientist-philosopher Blaise Pascal. “While the present never satisfies us, experience dupes us, and from misfortune to misfortune leads us to death, their eternal crown… These are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.”
For C. S. Lewis, the very presence of this God-shaped desire within us was cause for faith: “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
Now, of course, Lewis could’ve been wrong about this. It may be that our desire for God cannot be satisfied. But that doesn’t make the desire go away any more than our sexual desires go away when they can’t be satisfied. As with sex, repression or abandonment of our God desire causes it to morph into other forms.
Those atheist philosophers honest enough to face the ramifications of their unbelief have acknowledged that, without God, both virtue and happiness must logically become manifestations of our will to power and pleasure.
The Marquis de Sade declared, “There is no God, nature sufficeth unto herself.” Therefore “if misery persecutes virtue and prosperity accompanies crime, those things being as one in Nature’s view,” isn’t it “far better to join company with the wicked who flourish, than to be counted amongst the virtuous who founder?”
Sade, the namesake of sadism, saw that the greatest pleasure of the strong is to satisfy their desires on the weak. One story has it that Sade helped spark the French Revolution by crying for help from within the Bastille. Though apocryphal, the story does illustrate this sadean insight: Seeking the basis of virtue within ourselves will quickly transform our quest for freedom into a riot of sadistic violence.
Nietzsche agreed that, without God, objective morality vanishes. We are left to deconstruct the genealogy of our contingent morals so that the strong among us can impose a morality of their own “beyond good and evil.” After his death, this philosophy was used — unfairly, some say; inevitably, I think — to support the depredations of Hitler and the Nazis.
Nietzsche’s most influential disciple, Michel Foucault, likewise believed that what we call morality is merely power in masquerade. To move beyond power’s oppressive conventions, he sought to dismantle them within himself and so destroyed himself (and likely others) in an orgy of sexual masochism.
We long for happiness. Happiness derives from virtue. Without God, virtue is a manifestation of power and desire. If we seek happiness in power and desire, we become agents of destruction. As God himself warned: “All those that hate me, love death.”
This is not to say that atheists can’t be good people, only that they can’t make sense of their own virtue. They cannot explain why the strong should suppress their desires for virtue’s sake. Thus even atheists, one way or another, will ultimately be forced to confront their unbelief in the context of God.
<h4><a href="https://thenewjerusalem.substack.com/p/the-age-of-willful-ignorance" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ: Find more in-depth articles from Andrew Klavan at &#8216;The New Jerusalem.&#8217;</a></h4>
Nevertheless, we seem to have entered a time in which the clerisy is desperate to ignore God’s presence even as a psychic construct. The panic over Oklahoma’s Bible mandate is only one example of the ubiquitous attempts to erase any mention of the source and motivation of our culture and history.
Brilliantly rational believers like C. S. Lewis and Rene Girard are relegated to second rate status beneath thinkers like Nietzsche and Foucault, whose philosophies led to disastrous outcomes. The atheist arguments of writers like Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker and Yuval Harari are praised and elevated, though it is clear these men, while obviously intelligent, have absolutely no understanding of what religious thinkers actually think.
In 2007, the European Union marked the 50th anniversary of its founding without once mentioning the religion that shaped the continent formerly called Christendom.
The brilliant Wall Street Journal book reviewer Barton Swaim recently remarked, “I don’t know how many lives I’ve read in which otherwise fair and capable biographers dismiss or minimize their subject’s expressions of faith for no obvious reason.” This is true onscreen as well where biopics about such fervent Christians as Louis Zamperini and Johnny Cash reduce their subject’s faith to a footnote.
The resistance against — the hostility toward — considering life and culture in light of our God-shaped yearnings may have begun as a rebellion against superstition and church oppression, but it seems to have metastasized into something like the rebellion of Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost: an attempt to free ourselves from moral reality altogether, so we can define our own natures, genders, rights and wrongs and make “a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
But because neither reality nor our desires will reshape themselves at our command, the predictable result of our willful ignorance about God is that we have become stupid about ourselves and our human situation.
The 2022 Pulitzer Prize winning novel &#8220;Trust&#8221; by Hernan Diaz contains a remark being much quoted on the internet as a kernel of wisdom: “God is the most uninteresting answer to the most interesting questions.” Taken as an axiom, this strikes me as the opposite of the truth. Certainly, without God, we can answer the questions available to science, namely how do things happen. But the most interesting question is always: why? And if the universe came into existence without an act of sovereign will, there can be no why. Everything just is.
Only when we consider the universe, our world and our lives as conscious acts of creation, can we begin to wrestle with the reasons they exist at all. This, this alone, is the path to finding meaning, virtue and happiness. If we think we can create a different path on our own, we do not know ourselves. We cannot know ourselves.
* * *
Andrew Klavan is the host of “The Andrew Klavan Show” at The Daily Wire. He is the bestselling author of the Cameron Winter Mystery series. The third installment, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/House-Death-Cameron-Winter-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B0BW1ZTVP9?ref_=ast_author_dp" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The House of Love and Death</a>,” is now available. Follow him on X: @andrewklavan
This essay originally appeared on Andrew Klavan&#8217;s Substack, &#8216;<a href="https://thenewjerusalem.substack.com/p/the-age-of-willful-ignorance" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The New Jerusalem</a>.&#8216;

Holy Bible Lying on a Parochial School Desk

The Age Of Willful Ignorance

Andrew Klavan

Education

Oklahoma

Public Schools

Here&#8217;s a side of the Clinton administration you probably don&#8217;t remember. Just a few months into Bill Clinton&#8217;s second term, the federal government announced a major initiative to fund abstinence-only sex education.
As the L.A. Times <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-03-01-mn-33685-story.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a> back in March of 1997, Clinton&#8217;s administration allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to programs teaching that sex before marriage is, &#8220;likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.&#8221; The Clinton-funded programs also taught that abstinence from premarital sex is, “the expected standard” of human behavior. That’s worth repeating: The Clinton administration said that abstaining from sex before marriage is the &#8220;expected standard&#8221; of human behavior.
That may sound surprising now, for obvious reasons. This was not exactly an administration that led by example on this front, or any other front. But at the time, especially in that pre-Lewinsky period, it wasn&#8217;t a particularly shocking move. From Reagan&#8217;s administration onward, there had been significant bipartisan support in Washington for teaching young people to wait until marriage before having sex. Democrats and Republicans agreed on this point: Hookup culture spreads disease and ultimately makes people unhappy. It wasn&#8217;t especially controversial, really.
As recently as 2010, CNN was running segments about how abstinence-education was effective. Watch:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="008 Abstinence Works" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_zk6-agFjEM?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
You won&#8217;t find many reports like that on CNN anymore. Do a quick search of their website, and you&#8217;ll learn that abstinence-only education is &#8220;not evidence-based.&#8221; The science shifted, apparently, as we&#8217;ve seen so often. 
Indeed, around the year that report aired — 2010 — federal funding for abstinence-only education began to wane under the Obama administration. Donald Trump brought it back to an extent. Then the Biden administration limited this funding again, though not as much as many Leftists were hoping.
Throughout all of this back-and-forth, pretty much the only group that&#8217;s remained consistent have been Christian conservatives. We&#8217;ve warned, for decades, that hookup culture will create many catastrophic problems in society. We promoted chastity and abstinence before marriage as the only workable alternative. That&#8217;s a position we took based on Scripture, based on thousands of years of human history, and based on plain old common sense. And for that, we were dismissed and mocked as out of touch and prudish and archaic and old fashioned, again and again, over the past several decades. 
What&#8217;s interesting about all of this mockery is that now — at long last — many of the same people who dismissed Christian conservatives are now coming around to basically agreeing with us. They&#8217;re conceding that abstinence until marriage makes sense, actually. The catch is that they&#8217;re doing it for all the wrong reasons.
New York Magazine&#8217;s &#8220;The Cut&#8221; just published an <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240622140615/https://www.thecut.com/article/women-celibate-dating-sex.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">article</a> outlining the new pro-abstinence trend that&#8217;s now so popular among young people. It&#8217;s <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240622140615/https://www.thecut.com/article/women-celibate-dating-sex.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">entitled</a>, &#8220;A Summer Without Sex: Celibacy is all the rage right now.&#8221; 
The Cut <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240622140615/https://www.thecut.com/article/women-celibate-dating-sex.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reports:</a>
<blockquote>Today, celebrities including Khloé Kardashian, Lenny Kravitz, Julia Fox, Kate Hudson, and Tiffany Haddish have touted the benefits of celibacy. Melissa Febos &#8230; is coming out with another memoir next year called &#8216;The Dry Season,&#8217; about a year of conscious celibacy. Other women are celebrating their dry seasons too, even to the point of competitiveness.</blockquote>
The report <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240622140615/https://www.thecut.com/article/women-celibate-dating-sex.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">continues</a>:
<blockquote>This Great Abstaining comes amid any number of moral panics about sex, mainly related to young people: They’re texting instead of hooking up, they’re getting off the apps, they’re forgoing marriage and children, they’re deemphasizing traditional romance and instead prioritizing platonic friendships like codependent but chaste Victorian pen pals.</blockquote>
Among the reasons for this “Great Abstaining,” according to the Cut, is that many women all over the world are drawing inspiration from the &#8220;radical-feminist South Korean 4B movement.&#8221;
Women who participate in this &#8220;4B movement&#8221; promise not to do four things: date men, have sex with men, give birth, or get married. Of course, attitudes like this are only making South Korea&#8217;s population crisis even worse. The country&#8217;s birth rate is well below replacement level, and dropping fast. That&#8217;s not going to improve if no one marries or has children. But the media is presenting this as some kind of feminist victory for South Korea, even though South Korea may not exist for very long if it keeps up. South Korea’s great achievement is embracing its own extinction, we’re told.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1393-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h4>
Take this article from Vogue, for example. They just came out with a similar piece praising women for their newfound love of celibacy. They <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/why-are-we-all-talking-about-celibacy-lenny-kravitz" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote</a>:
<blockquote>Is sex-free living going to be a thing? Could it actually be liberating to take the sex out of every equation? Are we entering a second wave of sexual emancipation in which one can simply opt out altogether? Maybe this summer can be a mini-break from the near-constant awareness of our own sexuality, of how (or whether) we attract. A vacation from transmitting and receiving sexual triggers. Will more of us be looking back on 2024 as the summer I turned sexless? No more afternoon delights, no more holiday romances—a veritable Celibacy and the City.</blockquote>
It&#8217;s kind of amazing to see Vogue discover that, in fact, women can &#8220;opt out&#8221; of having random sex with strangers. This is a whole new level of &#8220;sexual emancipation,&#8221; they say. No one has ever raised this possibility before. You can actually just not give yourself away to any random dude who vaguely shows interest. This is breaking news, courtesy of Vogue magazine: Women have free will. Can you believe it?
Several other outlets have been reporting on the same trend for more than a year now, in an equally shocked tone. The Independent, for example, <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/celibacy-dating-abstinence-b2260133.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wrote</a> last year that, &#8220;Celibacy has become all the rage among young people.&#8221; According to the Independent:
<blockquote>In recent years, &#8216;self-love&#8217; has been parodied as much as embraced. But the shift towards celibacy seems to have come from it. &#8230; The benefits from a period of celibacy are endless because, ultimately, it’s about self-development. And that’s a practice that will always provide some sort of enlightenment – regardless of your relationship status.</blockquote>
Imagine that. &#8220;The benefits from a period of celibacy are endless.&#8221; Again, across virtually all of the corporate press this is presented as something that&#8217;s just being discovered now. 
The Guardian, to give another example, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/21/celibacy-hetrosexual-women-boysober-4b-sex-positive-feminism" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reports</a> that &#8220;Sex-positive feminism had its moment – and now it has been replaced by voluntary celibacy.&#8221; That&#8217;s quite a headline from The Guardian, considering it was just a decade ago that The Guardian was running articles with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/sep/24/moral-case-for-sex-before-marriage" target="_blank" rel="noopener">titles</a> like, &#8220;The moral case for sex before marriage.&#8221;
Reversals like this are everywhere all of a sudden. In recent years, outlets like <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/12/style/modern-love-why-i-took-a-vow-of-celibacy.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The New York Times</a> and <a href="https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/sex-relationships/article/im-26-and-ive-tried-the-celibacy-trend-v2c9qtvx0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Sunday Times</a> have published lengthy first-hand op-eds written by authors who have committed to celibacy. In particular, the Sunday Times declared that &#8220;Celibacy has had a reboot, with more people abstaining from sex than ever.&#8221; And it’s important to note, if it wasn’t clear already, that in virtually all of these cases we’re talking about unmarried people abstaining from sex — abstaining from hookup culture, in other words. This is the “reboot,” the “trend,” the bright new idea that the media is suddenly celebrating.
And the trend is not just a media creation. Researchers at the University of Michigan have been tracking the sexual behavior of high school graduates for the past two decades, going back to 2004. They&#8217;ve <a href="https://news.umich.edu/american-young-adults-report-having-fewer-sexual-partners-higher-rates-of-abstention/#:~:text=Among%2021%2Dto%2D30%2D,of%20just%20over%20a%20quarter" target="_blank" rel="noopener">found:</a>
<blockquote>Among 21-to-30-year-old males, abstinence rose significantly between 2008 and 2020, from 14.4% to 23.5% — an increase of nearly two-thirds. Among females of the same age, abstinence also rose, though by less, rising from 12.8% in 2008 to 16.5% in 2020 — an increase of just over a quarter. &#8230; Young adult males now have a considerably higher rate of abstinence than young adult females.</blockquote>
There are obviously many factors that might explain this change. A lot of it is likely attributable to so-called involuntary celibacy. We know that, even as celibacy is becoming more common, chastity is becoming less common. The proliferation of internet porn makes that very clear.
So what’s happening here in many cases, it seems reasonable to conclude, is that many young single people have given up on finding love and commitment. They&#8217;ve despaired of ever forming a real romantic connection with anyone. So now they&#8217;re retreating into celibacy like a form of surrender.
The point is that it’s not an embrace of traditional values in most cases. They’ve ended up at the same place — abstinence — but have gotten there from a place of despair and defeat. 
In other cases, as in South Korea, people are apparently resorting to celibacy as some kind of strained, misguided political statement. Here&#8217;s someone by the name of Julia Fox, for instance:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="010 Julia Fox Celibate" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2l7PE32mTH4?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
&nbsp;
As twisted as that logic is, it actually makes sense on some level. These people understand that abstinence until marriage is an expression of self-control. And they understand that there&#8217;s a lot of benefits to a society where people practice self-control. But because they&#8217;ve rejected the old code of sexual morality, they have to come up with these bizarre, incoherent rationalizations for returning to it. They have to pretend that &#8220;Roe v. Wade&#8221; is somehow relevant to whether they want to be sexually promiscuous or not. Or they have to pretend that celibacy is part of some newfound &#8220;sexual liberation&#8221; movement — that another wave of feminism is in progress, where women have discovered for the first time that they have free will.
Here’s the point in all of this. The old code of sexual morality that they rejected — the one that those Christian conservatives were promoting, while being mocked and dismissed for it — that code was grounded, all along, in the true and the beautiful: in human dignity, love, commitment, chastity. The great virtues.
Those who repudiated that message for the sake of lust and instant gratification now find themselves living sexless lives anyway. They chose the opposite lifestyle and found it unfulfilling, harmful, destructive, and severely depressing. This is precisely what Christian conservatives warned would happen. This is why we said that hook up culture is bad; that the correct order of events is to find someone, pledge your love and loyalty to them, marry them, and then be physically intimate with them. In other words, we were right all along.
But in all of the coverage of the &#8220;celibacy trend,&#8221; there is of course no acknowledgment of that fact. There&#8217;s no recognition that we had this whole thing figured out many generations ago — thousands of years ago, in fact.
Unless all of these newly &#8220;celibate&#8221; people realize that celibacy is more than a trend or a political statement — then the satisfaction that they all say they&#8217;re feeling right now will be short-lived. &#8220;The Great Abstaining,&#8221; as The Cut put it, will give way to more unhappiness and inevitably more hedonism in short order.
The only way out of this cycle is to recognize why Christian conservatives have been calling for abstinence until marriage for so long, and give them some credit for it. The Religious Right has been repeatedly and consistently mocked for predicting the future for the past several decades now. We’ve always been right. About everything. It&#8217;s time for everyone else to start listening.

The word sex education written in chalk

Christian Conservatives Proven Right Once Again As Abstinence ‘Trend’ Gains Popularity

Christian Conservatives Proven Right Once Again As Abstinence 'Trend' Gains Popularity

Abstinence

Dating

Feminism

Matt Walsh

Readers Pass

The Louisiana governor signed into law legislation that requires a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in all public classrooms. 
And the Left absolutely lost its mind. 
The ACLU, who used to stand for free speech but now stands for radical leftism, immediately announced this was unconstitutional and they were going to stand up against it. 
CNN&#8217;s Elie Honig was asked if the display violated the First Amendment. He replied: 
<blockquote>Yes, flagrantly, in my view. If you wanted a perfect example of what the First Amendment prohibits, I think this is it. The First Amendment says Congress, government, shall make no law respecting establishment of religion, meaning state entities can&#8217;t do things that endorse any particular religion or religiosity in general. 
 
And if you look at those 10, there are some — I know one of the defenses is, well, these are themes that are consistent throughout civilized society and throughout religion. Shall not kill, number six, I&#8217;m cheating, because I&#8217;m looking. But you know, don&#8217;t kill, don&#8217;t rob, don&#8217;t steal, that kind of thing. But there are some Commandments that are inherently religious. Observe the Sabbath day. I&#8217;m the only God that you may worship. So, it&#8217;s an inherently religious document.</blockquote>
Here is the problem with this particular argument: The United States is not a fundamentally secular country. 
The First Amendment was designed to guarantee the practice of religion against the federal government. The idea that there is a separation wall between church and state in the sense that religion was never supposed to impact people&#8217;s values in how they vote, or religion could never be promoted in the public square, or religion could never be promoted against irreligion generally by the government is also untrue. There is no historical basis for this. 
The First Amendment specifically says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. This was never originally supposed to be implemented in the states. It took all the way until the 1940s for the Supreme Court to declare that this was now going to be applied at the state level.
In fact, nine of the 13 colonies had established churches at the time of the Revolutionary War. Connecticut maintained its Congregationalist church, a state-sponsored church, until 1818. New Hampshire had one until 1819. Massachusetts had one until 1833.
<h4><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1988-member-exclusive" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h4>
Well past the establishment of the First Amendment, there were states in the United States that established religions. Why? Because the goal here was to stop the federal government from establishing its own generalized religion that would prohibit people at the state level from having their own religions.
The idea that secularism was supposed to predominate in the United States is obviously untrue; none of the Founders believed that. Even the Founders who leaned toward atheism tended to believe religion had an extraordinarily positive effect on the body politic. The promotion of religion generally was considered a good thing by the Founding Fathers.
As President, John Adams wrote <a href="https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a letter</a> to the Massachusetts militia, saying: 
<blockquote>We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government for any other.</blockquote>
George Washington <a href="https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/george-washington-first-inaugural-address-1789" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> in his first inaugural address: 
<blockquote>The foundations of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality … there is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness. </blockquote>
Thomas Jefferson, the guy everyone talks about in terms of coining the phrase “separation between church and state,” <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/jefferson/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">recognized</a> “the moral branch of religion” as “how to live well and worthily in society.”
But for the last several decades, the courts have done something that is completely unprecedented and stupid: They have read the establishment clause and the free exercise clause as being opposed to one another.
The Constitution says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
There are two ways to read that, and the Supreme Court has read this in the dumbest possible way. One way is that Congress shall not prohibit you from freely exercising a religion. The second way is that Congress shall not establish any religion. And the Court has read them completely separately.
What that&#8217;s done is put them in conflict with one another because it turns out that if you express your religion freely in the public square, then the Supreme Court might say you&#8217;re violating the establishment clause.
But that&#8217;s never how these provisions were meant to be read. They were meant to be read in tandem. The basic idea was that you couldn&#8217;t establish any religion as the official religion of the United States, because in doing so, you would quash the free exercise of people of other religions via compulsion.
That is what the Constitution was designed to prohibit: compulsion in religion.
But there&#8217;s nothing compulsory about a sign on a classroom wall. If there were something compulsory about a sign on a classroom wall, there&#8217;d be all sorts of serious free speech issues in a classroom because it turns out classroom walls are filled with all sorts of stuff.
The argument is made that if I walk into a public school and there is a sign that quotes the Bible in a nondenominational way, it still violates my free speech. And the Ten Commandments are nondenominational because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all agree that the Ten Commandments were given to Moses, and they agree on the content of the Ten Commandments. 
In 1971, the Supreme Court took up the case Lemon v. Kurtzman. And they came up with an incredibly stupid test to determine whether some sort of government action violated the separation of church and state. They said that any law had to fulfill three conditions. One, it had to have a secular purpose. Two, it had to have a predominantly secular effect. And three, it had to not foster excessive entanglement between government and religion.
When you read that, it is, on its face, nonsensical. It basically doesn&#8217;t set any standard at all because you can make an argument for virtually any religious display that it both violates the Lemon test and also does not violate the Lemon test.
In 1980, when the Supreme Court ruled in Stone v. Graham, there was a law that required classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, and the Supreme Court found that it was unconstitutional because it had no secular legislative purpose. They said the Ten Commandments convey a religious undertone because they include the religious duties of believers worshiping the Lord God alone, avoiding idolatry, not using the Lord&#8217;s name in vain, and observing the Sabbath day. 
But that was based on a fundamental misreading that is enshrined in Lemon, that the government of the United States has to take no position between religion and irreligion, that the government of the United States has no interest in promoting public morality via generalized religion, that the government has to be absolutely agnostic about whether it is promoting the Ten Commandments or whether it is promoting paganism. 
In 2005, there was a similar case about a public display of the Ten Commandments. Justice Antonin Scalia dissented in this case. He <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/03-1693.ZD.html">wrote</a>, “What distinguishes the rule of law from the dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court majority is the absolutely indispensable requirement that judicial opinions be grounded in consistently applied principle.”
He was ripping the Lemon test. He was saying there&#8217;s no consistently applied principle. He continued:
<blockquote>That is what prevents judges from ruling now this way, now that–thumbs up or thumbs down–as their personal preferences dictate. … the Court acknowledges that the “Establishment Clause doctrine” it purports to be applying “lacks the comfort of categorical absolutes.” What the Court means by this lovely euphemism is that sometimes the Court chooses to decide cases on the principle that government cannot favor religion, and sometimes it does not. …
Besides appealing to the demonstrably false principle that the government cannot favor religion over irreligion, today’s opinion suggests that the posting of the Ten Commandments violates the principle that the government cannot favor one religion over another. That is indeed a valid principle where public aid or assistance to religion is concerned, or where the free exercise of religion is at issue … but it necessarily applies in a more limited sense to public acknowledgment of the Creator. 
If religion in the public forum had to be entirely nondenominational, there could be no religion in the public forum at all. One cannot say the word “God,” or “the Almighty,” one cannot offer public supplication or thanksgiving, without contradicting the beliefs of some people that there are many gods, or that God or the gods pay no attention to human affairs. With respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our Nation’s historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.</blockquote>
In other words, every time Joe Biden finishes his speech and says, “God bless our troops,” why isn&#8217;t that an establishment of religion in the same way it would theoretically be an establishment religion to put the Ten Commandments in a public school classroom? 
The answer is because it&#8217;s not establishing religion. Biden isn&#8217;t forcing you to do anything, and neither is the sign on the public school classroom. It is encouraging you to abide by the central fundamental moral premises of the West.
The attempt to remove the Ten Commandments says more about the society than the attempt to replace them. All of Western civilization is based on a merger of Judeo-Christian ethics found in the Old and the New Testaments and Greek reason.
Here’s why the Ten Commandments are important: They take certain fundamental principles and put them beyond the scope of debate, which is good. You don&#8217;t want to live in a society where “thou shalt not kill” is a debatable proposition. How about “honor thy parents”? We&#8217;re now a society that does not honor our parents and scorns our parents as racists and bigots and white supremacist and vestiges of the past.
How about “do not bear false witness”? We live in a society in which you are allowed to bear false witness so long as the political motivations of the person against whom you are bearing the false witness are suspect.
A society that abides by the Ten Commandments is going to be better than a society that does not.
The centralizing philosophy of the United States used to be grounded in Judeo-Christian virtue. That is why it is good to put the Ten Commandments back up on the wall. Not everyone will abide by them, but they will remind people that a functional society has to have a functional philosophy.
And the most functional philosophy over the last several thousand years has sprung from those Ten Commandments.

Ten Commandments Standing In The Desert

Bring Back The Ten Commandments

Bill of Rights

Constitution

First Amendment

Louisiana

Secularism

Supreme Court

America is in the middle of a very serious moral and economic crisis — and these two crises are deeply interconnected.
An Axios <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/06/18/trump-gop-scotus-musk-shame" target="_blank" rel="noopener">article</a> titled, “Never back down: Rich and powerful exploit post-shame society,” exposes some interesting information about this. Zachary Basu writes:
<blockquote>America is reaching the pinnacle of a post-shame society forged by Donald Trump and reinforced by powerful patrons. Nearly 50 years after Richard Nixon resigned before ever being charged with a crime, the GOP is a month away from nominating a convicted felon to be president. Polls suggest the race is extremely close. While he may represent the most extreme example, Trump isn&#8217;t the only one who has realized a lack of shame can be a crucial survival skill. </blockquote>
Put aside the fact that our “post-shame political society” actually arrived with Bill Clinton — when it turned out you could overtly make the case it was fine to mess with the interns because that was just a “sex issue.” “Post-shame society” has been in place for a very long time in the United States.
The real question in the United States is: Why don&#8217;t we have a guilt-based society?
Cultural anthropologists distinguish between two different types of societies when it comes to your internal feelings about anything you have done wrong: guilt-based societies and shame-based societies.
Guilt-based societies are internally directed; they are typically linked with Judaic and Christian moral systems. These would be systems in which you feel guilty before God because you have violated God&#8217;s moral scruples. A person feels an internal sense of guilt, whether or not anybody knows about what they did.
A shame-based society is one in which the society sets the standard, and society makes you feel ashamed and makes you “lose face.” Cultural anthropologists closely associate shame-based societies with countries like Japan or China. The idea is that you will be shamed into doing what is right.
Over the course of the last several decades as religion has declined in America, guilt-based society shifted into shame-based society, which has now shifted into a post-shame society. We were once a guilt-based society; people felt an internal obligation to act morally at the political level. That meant, politicians felt an actual sense of responsibility to solve the problems they were charged with solving.
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Politicians didn’t have to be shamed into acting morally; they felt an internal moral compulsion to try to do things that they&#8217;d been tasked with doing. They felt a moral duty to do the right thing.
With the decline of religion and a belief in moral absolutes, society shifted to a shame-based society, and political correctness replaced our moral system — and God. People would shame you into saying certain things or acting certain ways.
That has reared its ugly head in wokeness — the idea of shaming someone in public if they didn’t use the proper pronouns; say untrue things about America being a white supremacist society; put dumb lawn signs out that state, “In this house, we believe&#8230;”; or post a black square during Black Lives Matter to proclaim solidarity with people who were rioting.
If you didn’t, you were publicly shamed. We became a shame-based society because all your actions were directed toward the public and what the public thinks of you.
Now we have reached the reaction to that, which is the post-shame society. Basu is correct that we are a post-shame society, but I don&#8217;t think it revolves around Donald Trump.
I do think it has to do with our entire rootless, Godless system. Once you have a society that casts out God in favor of societal shaming and then replaces societal shaming with the blowback to that, the standards of the society are plainly wrong.
Thus, we won’t return to internal feelings about a moral God and what He demands of us. We&#8217;re going to practice moral relativism in a society that has a really bad set of standards, which means we will just have no standards at all.
You end up with shamelessness on every single side of the political realm. That means our politicians become frivolous, shameless, and stupid, and they don&#8217;t care about the actual problems facing the United States of America on a broad scale.
That is why I&#8217;m quite pessimistic about the possibility that our politicians actually solve our problems because they don&#8217;t feel they are somehow implicated in our country&#8217;s problems on a moral level.
They don&#8217;t feel a higher moral impulse to do what is right, simply because it&#8217;s right. Today, very few Americans — unless they are regular churchgoers, people who are deeply ensconced in religious community — feel an internal compulsion to do the right thing anymore.
Particular politicians may be interested in solving problems from time to time, but overall, the general kind of arc of the political universe in the United States bends towards foolish frivolity, toward bread and games as the Republic dies from the inside.
This directly relates to economics.
There is a chart from the Federal Reserve that shows the federal government&#8217;s national defense consumption expenditures and gross investments. The entrance payments on our debt now exceed what we spend on national defense every year.
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-753121" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/002_Chart-of-Doom-Federal-Interest-Payments-Exceed-Defense-Budget-copy.png" alt="" width="700" height="536" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/002_Chart-of-Doom-Federal-Interest-Payments-Exceed-Defense-Budget-copy.png 700w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2024/06/002_Chart-of-Doom-Federal-Interest-Payments-Exceed-Defense-Budget-copy-300x230.png 300w" sizes=" (max-width: 700px) 100vw, 700px" /></div>
This is a very real problem. If what we are paying to bondholders, many of whom are foreign bondholders, exceeds what we are spending on our national defense, that is the sign of an unstable and sick governmental structure. It means that we are not going to have the actual resources in order to arm up, to face a hostile world, to keep the seas free.
We are not going to have the ability to ensure shipping lanes. We&#8217;re not going to have the capacity to defend Taiwan; a Chinese blockade of Taiwan would disrupt the semiconductor market and amount to a global depression of extreme severity.
Meanwhile, Jonathan van Ness from “Queer Eye For The Straight Guy” is at the White House gallivanting around in a dress. There are still families of the soldiers killed in Afghanistan who have never been to the White House.
The national debt is now so extreme that it will exceed $50 trillion by 2034, according to the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/06/18/national-debt-budget-projections-cbo/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Congressional Budget Office</a>. They projected yesterday the federal debt will exceed 122% of the United State&#8217;s annual economic output by 2034. The deficit will swell to $1.9 trillion this fiscal year and keep growing until the overall national debt hits $50.7 trillion a decade from now.
The budget in the United States continues to expand. Medicare and Social Security are running low on funds. Within just a few years, the interest on the debt is going to exceed the payments we owe for Social Security.
This is a bipartisan problem because our frivolous political class doesn&#8217;t feel any sort of guilt-based moral impetus to solve serious problems. Instead, they push those serious problems into next week for the purposes of winning today. And then, once they win, what are the actual demands that are made upon them? Fairly minimal.
It is the job of our politicians to telescope and balance our present needs with the needs of the future. But our politicians don&#8217;t want to do this anymore. They&#8217;ve abdicated any sort of guilt-based obligation to do the right thing simply because it’s the unpopular thing.
Nobody actually wants to take responsibility for solving the serious problems that face the country. Few of our politicians are capable of even looking down the line at the serious problems we face because there&#8217;s no internal compass driving them to solve the problem.
And that is a genuine bipartisan problem.

National Debt

America’s Moral And Economic Crisis

2024 Election

Morality

U.S. Politics

On Monday, something peculiar happened. 
The president of Iran, an evil human being nicknamed the Butcher of Tehran, died in a helicopter accident on Sunday. One of the worst people on earth, he presided as a member of the Iranian pseudo-judiciary over the deaths of thousands of innocent people.
He presided over the crushing of all dissent from women and people who do not believe in Sharia law in Iran. He presided over the deaths of thousands of American troops and attacks on American allies. His proxy groups around the region have been involved in the deaths of thousands of human beings, including, of course, the 1,200 Israelis murdered on October 7 with the tacit permission and support of Iran via Hamas.
Then, on Monday, after he died in this helicopter accident, the immediate reception of the West was to lament his death. This was unprecedented in modern history.
For example, when Pol Pot, the genocidal dictator of Cambodia, died, Bill Clinton issued <a href="https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-the-death-pol-pot" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a statement</a> ripping into Pol Pot. He stated:
<blockquote>The death of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot has again brought to international attention one of the most tragic chapters of inhumanity in the twentieth century. Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge followers transformed Cambodia into the killing fields, causing the death of an estimated 2 million of their countrymen in a brutal attempt to transform Cambodian society.</blockquote>
Bill Clinton was a Democrat, a moderate member of the Left, and he used the opportunity of Pol Pot&#8217;s death to point out his evils and the human rights atrocities that he had committed. Historically, this has been the way we treat evil dictators and people associated with evil dictatorships; when they die, the world becomes a better place.
In 2023, when speaking at the United Nations, Raisi fully explained his intentions for the world, which was the domination of a radical form of Islam. He explained to the whole world that the era of the West was over, and the era of the Islamist was here:
<blockquote>The equation attributed to the hegemony of the West no longer resonates with the diverse realities of today&#8217;s world. Old powers will keep their current downward trajectory. They are the past, and we are the future. I repeat once again, they represent the past and we represent the future. We are the future. We do believe that according to divine will, just as divine prophets have promised, justice and fairness will overtake the world and the rule of the sincere people, those who truly followed the path of the Omnipotent, will reverberate throughout the world. A world that rejects ignorance. The world awaits the day in which the old paths will come to an end. </blockquote>
Raisi was talking about the messianic beliefs of Shia Islam. He gave a speech in February 2024 in which he ripped into the United States as millions of people turned out in rallies chanting, “Death to Israel, Death to America.”
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So what is the explanation for the reaction of the West?
The U.N. Security Council held a moment of silence for Ebrahim Raisi. The entire U.N. Security Council stood up for him, which is vile and disgusting.
The Senate chaplain, Rear Admiral Barry Black held a moment of prayer for the Iranian dictator, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ErxRX-Bqfg" target="_blank" rel="noopener">intoning</a>, “Lord, we pray for the Iranian people who mourn the death of their president. We pray in your loving name. Amen.”
The State Department put out a statement that was beyond parody, <a href="https://www.state.gov/on-the-death-of-iranian-president-raisi-and-others-in-a-helicopter-crash/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">saying</a>, “The United States expresses its official condolences for the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Amir-Abdollahian, and other members of their delegation in a helicopter crash in northwest Iran. As Iran selects a new president, we reaffirm our support for the Iranian people and their struggle for human rights and fundamental freedoms.”
Do you see how far we&#8217;ve moved? Pol Pot dies and Bill Clinton, a moderate Democrat, gives a statement about his human rights abuses and why it should remind us to fight human rights abuses in places like Cambodia.
Ebrahim Raisi is president in a regime that presides over terrorism across the world, and the State Department of the United States government puts out a statement with condolences for his death. 
The EU did the same. Charles Michel, who is the president of the European Council, put out <a href="https://twitter.com/CharlesMichel/status/1792438047058890987" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a statement</a> which read, “The EU expresses its sincere condolences for the death of President Raisi and Foreign Minister Abdollahian, as well as other members of their delegation and crew in a helicopter accident. Our thoughts go to the families.”
How about the families of the people who have been slain in protests against the Iranian dictatorship? How about thoughts for the families of the people who are living in repression and poverty, thanks to those dictators?
NATO, which is oriented against aggression by foreign powers, <a href="https://twitter.com/NATOpress/status/1792508173535883362" target="_blank" rel="noopener">stated</a>, “Our condolences to the people of Iran for the death of President Raisi, Foreign Minister Amir-Abdollahian and others who perished in the helicopter crash.”
The people of Iran don&#8217;t need your condolences. The people of Iran deserve your condolences for having to live under the terroristic auspices of this evil regime.
This is insanity. The entire West could have just stayed silent. They could have said nothing. Instead, they all came to the “moment of silence.”
There was no moment of silence in the UN Security Council for the victims of October 7. They did not stand up and pay homage to the 1,200 people who were slaughtered and 250 who were taken hostage by the terrorist group Hamas.
But they did stand to pay homage to a terrorist dictator who supported October 7 and proxy terror groups from Yemen to Lebanon to Syria to Iraq to Hamas.
What is going on in the West that Western leaders feel the necessity to give condolences on the death of an evil enemy?
There is an error in thinking that has become extraordinarily common in the West that leads to so many bad results. This error in thinking was made clear yesterday by Pope Francis. In his 60 Minutes interview, when asked what gave him hope, he <a href="https://m.facebook.com/watch/?v=772332671344936&amp;vanity=60minutes" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a>:
<blockquote>Everything. You see tragedies, but you also see so many beautiful things. You see heroic mothers, heroic men, men who have hopes and dreams. Women who look to the future. That gives me a lot of hope. People want to live. People forge ahead and people are fundamentally good. We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good.</blockquote>
There are three ways of reading human nature. The traditional Judaic way of reading human nature is that human beings are not inherently good. Human beings have an internal battle. That battle is between what we call the yetzer ha-tov, the good desire, and the yetzer ha-ra, the bad desire. These two things are fighting with each other all the time, and it is up to us to try to cultivate the good desire at the expense of the bad desire. If you do it well, presumably you can even turn the bad desires toward the good.
Then there is the Catholic perspective, as stated by St. Thomas Aquinas, which is that human beings are inherently good in the sense they were made in God&#8217;s image, but through Original Sin, human beings were then cursed with the capacity for sin. That capacity for sin is dominant and powerful, and Original Sin could only be expunged with the death of Jesus.
The secularist idea is that human beings are inherently good, and not only are they inherently good, most human beings are not even sinful.
That is at odds with both the Judaic and the traditionally Christian view of human nature.
The traditionally Christian worldview on human nature is that while the human heart might be made in the image of God — meaning that on a fundamental soul level, the soul of human beings is good — the Bible is replete with statements about how sinful human beings are. But whether you&#8217;re talking about the book of Mark, where Jesus said no one is good except God alone; Romans where he said none are good, no, not one; Jeremiah, where the prophet says the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; or Psalms 51:5 which <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+51%3A5&amp;version=NASB1995" target="_blank" rel="noopener">says</a>, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me,” the traditionally religious view, at the very least, is that the human capacity for sin is extraordinarily strong — and that means all people are inherently sinners.
The solution to that differs between Judaism and Christianity. The solution to that for Judaism is to perform the mitzvot and act in virtuous ways, and you will become more virtuous and you will dominate over sin. As God says to Cain at the beginning of the book of Genesis, sin crouches at your door, but if you&#8217;re strong, you can rule over it.
The Christian perspective is: Only through the grace of Christ can you expunge that Original Sin, giving you the capacity for a free will so that you can conquer sinful nature.
Then, there&#8217;s the secularist point of view, which is different from both of these and is a mis-read of Judeo-Christian tradition. The basic idea is that human beings are not only inherently good — not only is the heart inherently good — but sin is also not something internal to human beings. It&#8217;s not even a force that human beings fight on an individual level. Sin only exists in systems, not in individual human beings. There&#8217;s no such thing as sin. Human beings have a nature, and that nature is inherently good. And if you consider something sinful, it&#8217;s probably because you are the problem.
You see this in secular society all the time. If two people love each other, how can it be a sin? If you do something bad to another person, that&#8217;s just relativistic. It&#8217;s relativistic in morality. Who are you to judge?
All of that is a misreading of traditional Judeo-Christian doctrine. All of it.
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But that widespread secular perception — that human beings are inherently good and that the only problem with human beings is the systems above them — leads to two incredibly false conclusions.
The first fundamental assumption is: Human beings generally agree on right and wrong. This is a lie. It is not true. It is fundamentally false. Human beings do not agree on right and wrong.
There are very few things most human beings agree on (for example, murder is wrong), and, traditionally, even that has to be bounded by the tribe because it turns out that people and tribes are pretty open about being fine with murdering people who are in other tribes. Human beings do not, at a fundamental level, agree on wide aspects of right and wrong — at least not once it comes to outside the tribe.
The second fundamental assumption that arises from the idea that human beings are good is: All it requires is better human institutions and an organizing effort to effectuate right over wrong. Progress is the effectuation of this attempt.
That is the basic Left-wing theology when it comes to curing the sin of the world, considering sin does not abide at the level of the individual; sin only abides at the level of the society. It is the Marxist materialist idea that the only reason people are bad is because the systems under which they live are inherently bad and corrupt, and therefore, if we can cure those systems, then humanity will be magically and absolutely transformed.
This is written in the Communist Manifesto. What people mistake about Marxism is that it’s not an economic philosophy so much as it is a religious philosophy as to how the sin of the world can be cured by curing the systems at the top level.
When put into the language of international politics, this leads to a bizarre belief in international order that is just a lie.
This is why the West is paying homage to Ebrahim Raisi. They feel in the West, if they are nice enough to Raisi and if they change the systems enough, then people like Raisi, his followers, and the mullahs in Iran will become inherently good. In other words, they&#8217;ll become inherently good if we change the international order because human beings are naturally good.
This is absolute trash. It is nonsense. It is garbage. And it is going to create more violence in the world.
If you believe all you have to do is massage your enemies and suddenly they will be your friends, you will be used by your enemies.
And that is what we are seeing right now.

Helicopter Carrying Iran President Reportedly Crashes Near Azerbaijan

Why The West Mourns The ‘Butcher Of Tehran’

Why The West Mourns The 'Butcher Of Tehran'

Bill Clinton

Catholic Church

Iran

Middle East

Pope Francis

When you cater to crazy people, you end up with a crazier country.
And you deserve to lose if you decide to cater to the crazy. That&#8217;s true on every side of the political aisle. All the American people want is some semblance of normalcy. That&#8217;s all they want. They&#8217;re begging for it. Some semblance of just being an adult with a normal set of values would be amazing from anyone.
But, instead, we&#8217;ve decided we&#8217;re going to elevate crazy on pretty much every side of the political aisle. It&#8217;s totally wild and insane. We&#8217;re tearing ourselves apart by elevating crazy.
I think there&#8217;s a reason why we are elevating crazy to this extent. And I think the real reason why we&#8217;re elevating crazy across the aisle is because we don&#8216;t have a centralizing set of values.
It used to be that the older generation would say to the younger generation, “Guys, you&#8217;re morons. You don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;re talking about. Let me give you some time-tested wisdom,” as Thomas Sowell has talked about in the realm of economics.
It’s true across all branches of knowledge. There are a few ways to gather data; controlled studies is one way, but even controlled studies are not going to be as good as time-tested wisdom used over the course of centuries.
This is why it is very important to transmit culture, rules, and values to your children. This is why religion has traditionally been an extremely useful preserve of actually maintaining cultural and systemic health.
When I teach my kids the rules and I say, “God says you should do X, Y, and Z,” I&#8217;m not just saying, “God says you should do X, Y, and Z because I read the Bible this morning.” I&#8217;m saying that God says, “Do X, Y, and Z because I have a transmitted history of cultural utility that is thousands of years long, and these rules have worked over the course of thousands of years, and I&#8217;m transmitting them to you.”
The proof of the godliness of the rules on a utilitarian level is that they work. The rules are useful; thus, it&#8217;s good proof that if God said them, He was right. And even on a utilitarian level, even if God didn&#8217;t say them, they would still be right.
But as religion has declined, as people are afraid, as parents fear inculcating values in their kids, a problem arises.
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There are some critiques that are made of classical liberalism along these lines, and those critiques are somewhat well-founded. There are conservatives who say the problem with classical liberalism — which suggests freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and so on — is that they can quickly lead to moral relativism if there is no centralizing, coherent set of values we all share.
That&#8217;s true. Liberalism can lead to moral relativism. The idea to “let a thousand flowers bloom” is fine as long as the flowers are within a certain set of parameters. To say all views are equivalent and thus liberalism is important, is wrong. Not all views are the same, and not all views are good. There are certainly very many bad views.
The rationale for liberalism is to restrict tyrants. Liberalism is a response to people who would shut down valuable speech.
But the roots of classical liberalism lie in a shared tradition of virtue. That&#8217;s true for any set of freedoms. Any set of freedoms has to exist within a set of broader rules.
Think about any game that you play. If you&#8217;re playing chess, you have the freedom to make any move that is within the rules on the board. If you just upturn the chessboard, that is no longer liberalism; you have taken the freedoms and extended them into a realm that defeats and destroys the freedoms.
There should be a shared set of rules and parameters in order for any of this to be upheld. What has happened in our culture is that religion and religious values, Judeo-Christian biblical values, used to be the shared basis for our culture, and then we could share a lot of freedom within those broad parameters. But as people have changed Judeo-Christian values, as fewer people go to a church or synagogue that actually teaches the Bible — some synagogues and churches are teaching the church of Karl Marx or the Church of John Dewey or the Church of FDR or the Church of Barack Obama or the Church of Joe Biden — religion has declined. As that happens, you let in the crazies, because once there&#8217;s no shared set of parameters, then any conspiracy theory at all gets through the door.
The only reason conspiracy theories end up getting a lot of traction is due to institutional distrust. Such institutional distrust has certainly been earned by, for example, the legacy media or the scientific community, which promote absolute lies on a fairly regular basis because they have a set of values and narratives that override the facts, such as the entire scientific community declaring that boys can be girls and girls can be boys. As this occurs, obviously institutional distrust is going to set in.
The converse of that is people who aren&#8217;t going to trust anything the government has to say when it is incompetent at so many tasks and also involves itself in your life in a myriad of ways. They have institutional distrust for the government and anything the government says they are not going to believe.
The major check on this used to be godly values. It used to be church. It used to be going out and touching grass, being with some real people, and discussing what&#8217;s rational and true. But as sources of truth and values decline, what fills the gap is a necessity to explain the world around you.
People have always wanted to explain the world around them, and they have historically had many tools to do so. One of those tools, the most important tool, was biblical religion in the West — the idea there is a God who stands above the creation of the universe, and there is a logic to His universe, and there is a set of moral rules that provide guidance for navigating through that universe. That is the basic religious principle of all biblical living.
But as that declines, people see a disconnected set of events so they immediately search for some sort of explanation for that disconnection.
This is why conspiracy theories thrive; when institutional trust declines and when biblical values — which offer an ultimate explanation for everything — decline, there&#8217;s nothing to fill the gap except for constant conspiratorialism.
That’s why there is this new push to explain everything through conspiracy. Everything is a conspiracy because the world’s a puzzling place and people need an explanation. And the easy explanation is to make one up in your own head about how there is a group of people in a back room somewhere who are manipulating all the systems.
It can&#8217;t just be that life is totally chaotic and that there are a lot of people who are morons out there doing stupid things. It can&#8217;t be that. It has to be that there is actually something deep and nefarious going on.
And it&#8217;s every single story.
When a bridge collapses in Baltimore, the Left makes the claim it has something to do with dirty fuel and the Right makes the claim it has something to do with DEI.
I don&#8217;t know because I don&#8217;t know the facts yet. The facts are still coming out. But when the facts come out, we&#8217;ll know exactly why that happened.
Then weird conspiracy theories about Princess Kate surface when she goes missing. Yet it&#8217;s fairly obvious when a rather prominent person goes missing, it&#8217;s probably a health problem. But instead, there are just tons of conspiracy theories on all sides of the aisle.
And then when Princess Kate says she is undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, a new slate of conspiracy theories arises. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/27/kate-middleton-video-cancer-ai/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">According</a> to the Washington Post, “Users on TikTok, X and Facebook shared videos pointing out alleged AI breadcrumbs, such as a ring disappearing and reappearing on Catherine’s hand. Others said her hair moves unnaturally, or that the bed of daffodils in the background is suspiciously still.”
The tendency of our society right now to buy into nearly every conspiracy theory and give them all a hearing without just saying, “Nope, that sounds stupid,” is a reflection of the complete decentralization of values — because now, you&#8217;ll be willing to hear pretty much anything.
“Is the CIA behind everything that you see and hear? Is it possible that the moon landing never happened?” These kinds of conspiracy theories are arising because of the vacuum of values. That vacuum of values is almost solely due to the decline of religion.
The decline of religious life in America is the single worst thing that&#8217;s happened to the United States since about 1950. It continues apace today. Yet all the secular institutions that were supposed to fill that gap have failed because, of course, they were always going to fail; no secular rationale can fill the explanation God plays in our lives.
So you end up with a bunch of fools running around suggesting their own supposedly plausible explanation for what is happening.
This is why the ultimate explanation, the most self-serving conspiracy theory of all and the one that has arisen on all sides of the political aisle, is a sense of victimization.
When you feel the world around you is chaotic and confused and discombobulated, when you feel like a victim, and then you look for an explanation as to why your failures are not your own fault, it must be because there’s someone who&#8217;s stopping you from succeeding.
And the hardest thing to understand in the world when you are failing is that perhaps it is your fault. Maybe you do need to change what you&#8217;re doing in your life. This is true for 90% of human problems, at least in a free West. There are certainly places in the world where tyranny abides, but that is not true in the United States of America.
Politicians always have a stake in engaging in a conspiracy theory because the beauty of being engaged in one is that the prophet is the person who promulgates it.
The person who promulgates the conspiracy theory is the person you&#8217;re supposed to listen to because they will guide you forward, they will help you, and they will alleviate all your problems. If you just give them enough power, they will fight it. They will destroy the Matrix. They will destroy all of what you&#8217;re seeing, and they will lead you free. It&#8217;ll be like Plato&#8217;s cave. They&#8217;ll come back from outside the cave, and they will lead you back toward the light.
But they never lead you toward the light because every failure can now be attributed to that same conspiracy. If they fail to lead you, if you buy into their conspiracy theory, and if you give them power and your life still does not get better, they just say it&#8217;s because the conspiracy is so damned powerful. There&#8217;s no way they can overcome it.
This is the danger of conspiratorial thinking, and it is filling up every cup that has been left empty by God, religion, and community. It&#8217;s filling up all the political cups right now.
It&#8217;s extremely dangerous.
The Left-wing brand is, of course, what Joe Biden is doing by suggesting that the system is rigged against a wide variety of people. But it&#8217;s also happening on the Right, where the suggestion is — without evidence in many cases — that the system is rigged.
Here&#8217;s the thing: There are situations in the United States where the system is rigged, but you can tell what they are — not because someone posited a conspiracy theory without any evidence whatsoever, just spitting out dumb conspiracy theories — but because people say it and they do it.
It is not a conspiracy theory, for example, to suggest that Asians are being discriminated against on college campuses. How do you know it? Because you can see it in the statistics, recruitment materials, documentation, and at all of the major colleges. That&#8217;s not a conspiracy theory.
What America needs to get back to normal is the same thing it always needed: church, community, and a fact-based, rational approach to politics. That&#8217;s all people need.
Maybe they don&#8217;t want it. Maybe it&#8217;s too easy in this day and age to jump immediately to some sort of narrative that explains why you&#8217;re a victim of the society in which you live in the freest, most prosperous society in the history of humanity.
But that&#8217;s not going to lead to a happy life.

Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapses After Being Struck By Cargo Ship

Conspiracy Theories And Returning To Normal

Baltimore

Conspiracy Theory

Francis Scott Key Bridge

Jewish

It&#8217;s rare to see actual Biblical-level events taking place in normal, everyday life. But that is what is happening over at Burning Man.
According to the Associated Press: 
<blockquote>“An unusual late-summer storm turned a week-long counterculture fest into a sloppy mess with tens of thousands of partygoers stuck in foot-deep mud with no working toilets in the northern Nevada desert.”</blockquote>
When a hurricane hits Florida, the Left acts as though it&#8217;s because of the great sin that we have all committed in driving cars and running our air conditioners.
So now, I get to joke about how a bunch of morons decided they were going to jet-set into the desert, in the middle of nowhere — where it&#8217;s 115 degrees — to screw each other. Then there&#8217;s a giant, Biblical-style rainstorm and flood and no one bothered to bring enough wood to build an ark.
<blockquote>“Some Burning Man revelers said Sunday their spirits remain unbroken.” </blockquote>
Unfortunately, their toilets do remain broken. And so they are just sitting there in their own poop, screwing each other. It sounds like the height of human experience. 
The elites there treated it as though they escaped the beaches at Normandy. You wonder why people don&#8217;t trust the elite. You wonder why there&#8217;s a giant cultural gap between the Left Coast and the East Coast on one side and everybody in the middle of the country on the other.
These morons went out in the middle of the desert to worship their pagan selves and then got stuck in the mud? Well, that’s a rough ride for you. 
A lot of Americans have been dispossessed of the Judeo-Christian architecture that used to undergird the United States of America. They&#8217;ve been dispossessed by a bunch of pagan morons who believe that the actual value system is radical self-expression and individualism. The great capitalists, from Adam Smith to John D. Rockefeller, understood that undergirding capitalism was a Judeo-Christian value system. Rockefeller went to a church and sat in the pews next to people who were a fraction of his wealth.
What used to unify the country was a belief system that the elites held in common with the common man. It was the same belief system overall. It was the radicals who were proclaiming the creed of radical self-expression. But now it&#8217;s not the radicals — now it&#8217;s the most powerful people in the society who have basically decided the reason they became powerful is because they followed their star.
But it’s not true. They&#8217;re actually more likely to be married with kids than people who are not high earners in American society. But they promulgate the lowest values. When I say the lowest values, I mean like the hippies on the commune or burning giant nine-foot tall statues. 
One of the weird elements of the United States is that the counterculture is no longer the counterculture. It used to be that we called people who did things like Burning Man strange. But now, if you say they are weirdos who are participating in weird pagan mystic behavior, you are considered strange. You&#8217;re considered part of the problem. You are intolerant.
The counterculture is no longer the counterculture. It is, in fact, just the culture, which is why you see so many rich and famous people going to Burning Man.
It used to be that if you were a rich, famous person, you took yourself seriously enough that you didn&#8217;t show up in the middle of the desert with nothing but a hammer and then go to the Orgy Dome all day. It used to be that serious people in our culture were serious.
You get all of the tech billionaires who show up at Burning Man and then proclaim they have allegiance to these sorts of principles. Then others adopt the principles, and then it becomes the culture in which they swim.
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It used to be that if you showed up at Burning Man, you showed up with a bunch of plywood and a hammer; now, if you are a rich person, you show up at a turnkey camp. According to Mashable, the festival offered luxury amenities, cleaning staff and chefs, while reportedly wreaking havoc on the environment by chartering flights to get there.
You have an entire elite strata of our society that hates itself and that is constantly seeking to signal to everybody else how much it hates itself by doing things like going to Burning Man. They don’t seek to exemplify the behavior that everybody else should engage in. And if they do, they believe their behavior should be this hippie garbage and we should all just laugh and giggle along with them as they go to their Sodom and Gomorrah-style pleasure dome.
The principles of Burning Man look like a religion. Burning Man’s 10 principles declare:
<blockquote>“Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.”</blockquote>
That’s a lie. If you show up as a Bible thumper, I guarantee you you&#8217;re not going to be welcome over at Burning Man, where no one has a shower, but they&#8217;re all having sex with one another.
Burning Man’s principles also state: 
<blockquote>“Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.”</blockquote>
That is wildly untrue. It turns out that Burning Man has had a bad history over the past few years of leaving garbage strewn along the highways as people careen out of there as fast as possible. 
Contrast the Ten Commandments of Burning Man with the actual Ten Commandments, things like respect thy father and mother, remember the Sabbath and keep it holy, don&#8217;t commit murder, don&#8217;t commit adultery, don&#8217;t commit idolatry. One of these sets of rules has built a civilization that has lasted for literally thousands of years. The other set of rules lasted until a heavy rainstorm.
Perhaps that’s the real story of Noah&#8217;s Ark, that the rain wasn’t all that heavy. Maybe the society was just not durable. In the absence of God, paganism rules. It is not that there is no God, it’s that there are many gods. And these gods typically involve self- worship, which is where things currently stand. This idolatry is idolatry of the self.
We celebrate a holiday in Judaism that&#8217;s coming up shortly called Sukkot. You build a hut outside your house and you are supposed to live in it for a week. The purpose of it is to remind you that you are at the mercy of God. You&#8217;re supposed to build the hut so you can see the stars through the roof. It’s open to the rain. The whole purpose of it is to remind you that while you are a physical creature, there is something more spiritual to you than that.
The idea is that when you decorate all the physical surroundings around you, that&#8217;s not the essential you. So then, what is the essential you?
It&#8217;s unity with God. That&#8217;s the part that matters.
Disconnect that and all you end up with is a bunch of morons rolling around in the mud and then being mad at each other when they have to poop in a bucket. 

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1 Ben Shapiro Editorial Series 03 2COPY2 copy

Elites, Burning Man, Paganism, The Flood — And The Need For God

Coastal Elites

Nevada

Sexually explicit

*Warning: the following article links to images containing nudity*
&#8220;Public crotches good, public crosses bad,&#8221; goes the Leftist worldview today. That mantra has actually summed up the Left for quite some time now, but it was on full frontal display — literally — this past Pride month.
In cities from coast-to-coast last weekend, grown men, women, and everything in between  — their argument, not mine — <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/naked-men-in-front-of-children-pride-parades-in-u-s-canada" target="_blank" rel="noopener">practically bared it all in fountains</a>, on bikes, and at dance parties in the street.
Children, of course, were present for and subjected to appalling scenes. Normal-minded Americans condemned this sort of behavior as depraved. Others like Ron Filipkowski <a href="https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1673107271633764352?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a> the real problem with these sorts of scenes is that they will be used by the GOP for political fodder. He apparently wasn&#8217;t so concerned with the destruction of childhood innocence.
Of course, pride parades have always included lewdness. In 2001, The Onion <a href="https://www.theonion.com/gay-pride-parade-sets-mainstream-acceptance-of-gays-bac-1819566014" target="_blank" rel="noopener">even lampooned the events</a> with a column titled, &#8220;Gay-Pride Parade Sets Mainstream Acceptance Of Gays Back 50 Years.&#8221;
But it is no longer that the LGBTQ+ agenda seeks mere acceptance — if that was ever its goal. The Left wants to replace Judeo-Christian values. It always has.
As Daily Wire Editor emeritus Ben Shapiro <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-revolution-at-the-heart-of-pride" target="_blank" rel="noopener">said</a>, &#8220;Pride Month is not a call for equality, but a call for revolution. The Pride movement was always a call for a replacement of historic, tried and true cultural norms with new, untried, and risky cultural norms.&#8221;
Indeed, from our <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/theyre-liars-ben-shapiros-not-buying-wh-shock-over-topless-trans-person-at-pride-event" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Executive Branch</a> to your <a href="https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C5GCEM_enUS998US998&amp;q=library+drag+show&amp;tbm=nws&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwifjcyMpuv_AhWmtokEHe3jDnMQ0pQJegQICRAB&amp;biw=1775&amp;bih=995&amp;dpr=1.6" target="_blank" rel="noopener">local library</a>, and even in &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/talking-to-kids-about-gay-stuff-is-actually-crucial-meet-the-lgbtq-content-creators-and-companies-indoctrinating-your-kids" target="_blank" rel="noopener">kid-friendly entertainment</a>,&#8221; the message is simple: In order to be a good person, you have to accept the LGBTQ+ agenda wholeheartedly. Judeo-Christian values which put forth the traditional concept of family, sex, and gender are to be shunned, or somehow twisted into supporting the LGBTQ+ agenda (Jesus says to love everybody! No judgment!). 
That sort of tolerance leads to events such as naked weirdos marching down the street under the rainbow flag.
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Americans who disagree with that <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/parental-rights-groups-now-on-hate-map-with-kkk-southern-poverty-law-center-decides" target="_blank" rel="noopener">wind up on hate lists</a>, are effectively <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/catholic-group-sues-doj-fbi-over-failure-to-comply-with-foia-request-detailing-anti-catholic-memo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">targeted by the Department of Justice</a>, and are treated as extremists.
Meanwhile, several federally-funded <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/house-republicans-blast-texas-va-hospital-removal-cross-shaped-remember-our-veterans-display" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Veterans Affairs</a> clinics have <a href="https://ffrf.org/news/news-releases/item/42253-va-center-in-w-va-removes-cross-after-ffrf-objects">removed</a> cross-shaped designs in what Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX) said are &#8220;attempts to sterilize the public square &#8230; of all symbols of Christianity.&#8221;
In professional sports, a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/blue-jays-cut-pitcher-who-apologized-for-sharing-video-on-bud-light-target-boycotts" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Christian athlete</a> was cut in part due to his performance as well as &#8220;distraction,&#8221; after he voiced support for boycotts of companies that promote the LGBTQ religion — despite apologizing.  The Los Angeles Dodgers infamously chose to honor a blatantly anti-Catholic &#8220;<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/boycott-the-dodgers-catholic-bishops-finally-fighting-back-against-anti-catholic-hate-group" target="_blank" rel="noopener">hate group</a>,&#8221; as described by Catholic Bishop Robert Barron. Members of that group openly perform sexual dances in a mockery of some of the Catholic Church&#8217;s core beliefs, sacraments, and matters of faith.
And last weekend, a man <a href="https://www.theblaze.com/news/pro-lgbtq-mayor-says-freedom-of-speech-doesnt-apply-to-man-arrested-after-trying-to-quote-bible-at-pride-rally?utm_source=dlvr.it&amp;utm_medium=twitter" target="_blank" rel="noopener">protesting</a> a gay pride parade while shouting Bible verses was arrested and condemned by his local mayor. His charges were dropped, but legal experts say that the arrest was clearly politically motivated — not grounded in the law. The local government soon changed its mind, as a Facebook post from the Berks County District Attorney, where the man resides, reads, &#8220;After a review of the incident which took place on June 3, 2023, in the 800 block of Washington Street in the City of Reading, the District Attorney’s Office has withdrawn the charges of disorderly conduct filed against Damon Atkins.&#8221;
So it is not that liberals do not believe that the public square should be neutral and devoid of religion. They wrongly believe that having America&#8217;s guiding principles since its inception, Judeo-Christian values, in public life is damaging to our moral fabric — oppressive even.
They believe that public celebration and promotion of LGBTQ+ values is a good thing. The &#8220;new religion&#8221; of LGBTQ+  is not only a net positive for society but a prerequisite for true liberation, Leftists claim.
This column barely scratches the surface of this issue, but, remember, for the Left, &#8220;Public crotches good, public crosses bad.&#8221;
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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