Is SCOTUS Illegitimate?

One tactic progressives are trying out in their frustration with the eminently reasonable Dobbs decision which sent abortion back to the states is to declare the Court "illegitimate."

Over the weekend Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez opined that the Court has created a crisis of legitimacy because Clarence Thomas' wife sent tweets on January 6th expressing her concerns about the November election.

Senator Elizabeth Warren tied her conclusion that the Court is illegitimate more directly to the Dobbs decision. Her solution was to make the Court truly illegitimate in the eyes of the public by packing it with additional left-wing Justices.

On what grounds do these and other Democrats argue that the Court is illegitimate? There are several.

One is that because the Court hands down rulings that they don't like that makes it illegitimate. This is, of course, absurd. The Court is not a legislature. It doesn't, or shouldn't, bend to the popular will. It's role is to assess whether a given statute is consistent with the Constitution as well as determine whether rights that are claimed by plaintiffs really are granted by the Constitution.

Popularity should have nothing to do with these judgments. As others have pointed out the IRS is not popular but it's not for that reason "illegitimate."

Jim Geraghty notes the irony that if someone were to claim that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president "many Democrats will react with outrage and contend that this belief is an attack on democracy and the American government itself. But if you argue that the Supreme Court is illegitimate, you are qualified to be a leader in the Democratic Party."

Another reason some Democrats are proffering for declaring the Court illegitimate is that several of the nominees who voted to overturn Roe allegedly lied to Senators during the confirmation process. According to this allegation they told Senators that they would not overturn Roe and then they did.

Did they lie? According to the Wall Street Journal that's very unlikely:

Perhaps the most unfortunate claim is that the Justices in the Dobbs majority lied during confirmation hearings. The charge is that they suggested that Roe v. Wade was a precedent that couldn’t be overturned.

Coaxed on the point on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said this is grounds for impeachment, and don’t be surprised if other Democrats pick up that cudgel.

Sens. Susan Collins and Joe Manchin said Friday they feel Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch deceived them on the precedent point in testimony and in their private meetings with the Justices. We weren’t in those meetings, but we’d be stunned if either Justice came close to making a pledge about Roe. The reason is that the first rule of judging is that you can’t pre-judge a case. Judges are limited under Article III of the Constitution to hearing cases and controversies, and that means ruling on facts and law that are specific to those cases.

No judge can know what those facts might be in advance of a case, and judges owe it to the parties to consider those facts impartially. A judge who can’t be impartial, or who has already reached a conclusion or has a bias about a case, is obliged to recuse himself. This is judicial ethics 101.

There's no transcript, as far as I know, of those private meetings, so it's hard to tell if perhaps the senators misunderstood what they were being told, but the question came up in public hearings and there was no ambiguity in the candidates' answers:

Here’s Justice Gorsuch: “Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed. . . . So a good judge will consider it as precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court worthy as treatment of precedent like any other.”

He added that “If I were to start telling you which are my favorite precedents or which are my least favorite precedents, or if I viewed precedent in that fashion, I would be tipping my hand and suggesting to litigants that I have already made up my mind about their cases.”

And here’s Justice Kavanaugh: “Roe v. Wade is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed many times. It was reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992. . . . So that precedent on precedent is quite important as you think about stare decisis in this context.” He made no specific pledge about either case that we have seen.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett expressly rejected the idea that Roe was a super precedent.

In other words, those three nominees all granted that Roe was an important precedent, but they did not say that that made Roe immune from reconsideration.

I think there's a lot of truth in the WSJ's conclusion:

The fury of the left’s reaction isn’t merely about guns and abortion. It reflects their grief at having lost the Court as the vehicle for achieving policy goals they can’t get through legislatures.

The cultural victories they achieved by judicial fiat will now have to be won by persuading voters.

That's how a representative democracy is supposed to work. The people decide through their elected representatives what the laws will be in their states and the Supreme Court ultimately decides whether those laws are compatible with the Constitution.

By overturning Roe, a case in which a right to abortion was declared to exist that actually doesn't exist anywhere in the Constitution, SCOTUS returned abortion to the states for the people to determine what they want the law to be where they live.

Unfortunately, that exercise in genuine democracy seems to have outraged the left.

Dumping Mr. Biden

Many Republicans were willing to tolerate Mr. Trump's boorishness, at least until after January 6th, because his policies were putting the country back on the right track.

He appointed constitutional conservatives to the courts, stemmed the tide of illegal immigration, had the lowest minority unemployment in history, facilitated a rapprochement in the Middle East between Israel and its Arab neighbors, presided, until the pandemic, over a healthy economy, and once the pandemic struck implemented Operation Warp Speed to bring a vaccine to market in record time.

If, after the 2020 election, Mr. Trump had gone gently into temporary retirement and conducted himself with unwonted class he'd be a lock to regain the White House in 2024.

Alas, such was not in the man's character and so the question for Republicans after this November's midterm elections is whether they can produce a presidential candidate who will possess Donald Trump's virtues without his many manifest flaws.

The question for the Democrats, on the other hand, is how they can dump Joe Biden without winding up with Kamala Harris.

But why would they wish to dump Mr. Biden? Historian Victor Davis Hanson enumerates some of the reasons among which is Biden's chronic dishonesty:

Walking back Biden’s absurdities has become the nonstop, tiresome task of many on the Left. As they face a midterm disaster in November, many no longer see any compensating reasons not to drop Biden....

Unlike Trump’s art of the deal, exaggerations and distortions, Biden says things that are not simply untrue, but abjectly preposterous – such as the United States currently has a lower inflation rate than major European industrial powers.

In Biden’s world, there were no COVID-19 vaccinations until he took the oath of office. Russian President Vladimir Putin, or the oil companies, or the refiners, or Trump are responsible for the historic crippling gasoline price hikes he caused by canceling drilling and pipeline projects.

Biden claims his negative-growth, hyperinflating economy is not disastrous but strong.

He serially lies that he drove a semi-truck. He has not been to the Middle East 38 times. He never received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy. Nor was he a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

The MAGA movement is not the “most extreme political organization in American history.”

In other words, Biden reveals the same fantasies and plagiarism that ended his 1988 and 2008 presidential campaigns.

His penchant for the whopper is troubling enough, but there's more. Mr. Biden has a history of making maladroit racial remarks that would outrage Democrats were they made by a Republican:

On matters of race and sexuality, Biden is the epitome of that for which the Left, supposedly, has zero tolerance. Biden was infamous for damning with praise candidate Barack Obama as the first “clean” and “articulate” African American presidential candidate.

In a fake patois, Biden once warned an audience of black professionals that Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.”

During the 2020 campaign, candidate Biden derided a black journalist as a “junkie” and lambasted a radio host and his audience with the claim “you ain’t black” if they didn’t support his candidacy.

Spinning racialist fables like Biden’s “Corn Pop” stories would brand any conservative politician as a racist. As president, Biden still uses the term “negro,” and he called an African American adviser “boy.”

Then there are his dubious sexual antics and alleged transgressions. When Trump was accused of having an affair with porn "actress" Stormy Daniels or was discovered on tape boasting about groping female admirers inappropriately, the uproar nearly cost him the presidency in 2016. Yet Biden has a history that's arguably even more sleazy than Trump's:

After the Justice Brett Kavanaugh hearings, the nation was lectured that “women must be believed.” But it was the Left who attacked former Biden aide Tara Reade who surfaced in 2016 to accuse then Senator Biden, her former boss, of sexually assaulting her.

Biden himself had a creepy history of invading the private space of young women – inappropriately kissing them, hugging and squeezing them, and smelling and blowing into their hair and ears.

Finally, Biden was forced to apologize – sort of – by claiming he belonged to an earlier generation when such aggression was simply normal behavior. It was not then or now.

The latest controversies whirl around the British tabloid Daily Mail’s publication of the diary of Biden’s own daughter.

From the Mail’s lurid reporting, Ashley Biden seems to suggest that she showered with her father at an age when “showers w/ my dad (probably [were] not appropriate).” And she seemed to connect Biden familial inappropriateness with her regret over being “hyper-sexualized (at) a young age.”

Add to all this Mr. Biden's terrible poll numbers, his failure to do much of anything that makes the country recognizably better, and the coming, if the GOP controls the House in 2024, congressional investigations into his and his son's questionable financial arrangements, and the Democrats will be in a very difficult and embarrassing spot over the next two years.

Their challenge will be to finesse dumping both Mr. Biden, whom few Democrats really want as their president for eight years, as well as Kamala Harris who's as embarrassing in her own way as Mr. Biden and whom they don't want to succeed him.

It'll be interesting to see how they do it.

How to Spot a Homeschooler

From the satirical website the Babylon Bee: How to Spot a Homeschooled Child:

As a college instructor who has enjoyed having had many homeschooled kids in his classes over the years I can testify to the truth in the Bee's humor.

One of the criticisms that has been levelled at homeschooling over the last couple of decades is that students are deprived of interaction with others which stunts development of their social skills. If that's true it's hardly obvious in the students I've taught.

On the other hand, the students I've been fortunate to work with have been invariably personable, bright, well-educated (although maybe not up on the latest doings of the Kardashians) and academically disciplined and motivated.

The resort to online "learning" during the pandemic revealed a lot of unsavory stuff going on in some of the classrooms across the country, and the tardiness with which schools reopened in the wake of the Covid subsidence inspired a lot more parents to tackle homeschooling for themselves.

I suppose that many more will turn to this option in the future, or, if they can afford it, to private schooling. The infiltration of progressive ideology into public school classrooms has rendered them to toxic for a lot of parents, especially those who desire an education for their children that's not going to undermine their faith or their values.

When my generation went through high school most educators saw it as their personal and professional obligation to transmit the values and traditions of their communities to their charges. Today, too many educators, at all levels of education, see it as their mission to upend those values and traditions and to set their students at odds with their parents.

It's a good sign that parents are fighting back by recalling school board members and/or removing their children from offending schools. Perhaps as more parents hold their public schools accountable for what goes on in the classroom, private schools and homeschooling will become less necessary, but until then they're an attractive alternative.

Why Your Gas Is So Expensive

The energy policy put forward by this administration defies comprehension.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm declared on CNN's State of the Union Sunday show that “we need to have increased [petroleum] production, so that everyday citizens in America will not be feeling this pain that they’re feeling right now.”

Mr. Biden himself will be visiting with the Saudi's, whom he evidently no longer regards as international pariahs, to coax them to increase their oil production so that our domestic gas prices will subside.

When Mr. Biden took office we were a net exporter of petroleum and natural gas and regular blend gas at the pump was averaging around $2.33 a gallon. Today, eighteen months later, it's hovering around $5.00/gallon and Mr. Biden wants to import from the Middle East to increase supply. What happened?

The President likes to blame Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, but as Karl Rove points out in a column at The Wall Street Journal (subscription) 56% of the price increase occurred before Putin launched his invasion.

Though the administration is loath to talk about it what happened is that, as Rove writes, "Since taking office, Mr. Biden has labored hard to make American fossil-fuel production more costly so green energy alternatives become more attractive. He succeeded, and the result is record prices."

What, exactly, did the Biden administration do? Rove explains:

On his first day in office, Mr. Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and halted new leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A week later, he banned new oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters, and in June he shut down exploration on existing leases in ANWR.

In October, he increased the regulatory burdens on building pipelines and other infrastructure.

This February he limited leasing in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve. At every turn Team Biden has worked to restrict and reduce domestic oil and gas production.

Almost a year after a federal judge enjoined the White House from implementing its pause on leases in federal lands and waters, the administration in April finally offered 144,400 acres for exploration—only 20% of the acreage originally slated for this tranche of leases.

The administration also raised the federal royalty by 50%, increasing the cost on American consumers. It nominated regulatory officials hostile to fossil fuels and issued climate disclosure rules that made lenders skittish about providing capital.

Team Biden got what it wanted: Daily U.S. oil production dropped from 12.29 million barrels in 2019 to an estimated 11.85 million in 2022, well after demand had rebounded from the pandemic.

Given this environment it's little wonder that oil companies are reluctant to invest in upgraded refining capacity. Why should they spend millions, or even billions, of dollars on refineries when the administration has made it clear that they want to put petroleum companies out of business?

Mr. Biden is demanding that oil CEOs increase production while he has both hands around their throats strangling them to death. Not content with what he's done so far to throttle the industry he's now...

...threatening a windfall-profits tax, even though oil and gas production saw only a 4.7% net profit margin last year. Compare that with Microsoft’s 39% net margin, Facebook’s 33%, Google’s 30% and Apple’s 27%. Yet Mr. Biden won’t confiscate tech company profits.

Nothing the president has done to alleviate the burden on consumers has, or will, accomplish anything substantial or permanent. Neither releasing a few million gallons from the petroleum reserve or declaring a moratorium on the federal gas tax will result in a significant or lasting reduction in the price of gasoline nor the price of everything else that's manufactured and brought to market by gasoline.

Here's Rove:

If Mr. Biden were serious about lowering fuel prices, he’d follow the advice of President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who suggested Sunday “an all-in more-energy-supply approach that emphasizes freeing up fossil fuels.”

That means undoing all of Mr. Biden’s earlier decisions that pushed oil and gas prices up. It’s important to start now. It took a year and a half of bad actions to get here; it’ll take time to increase supply and thereby produce downward pressure on prices.

Rove offers some specifics:

To begin, Mr. Biden should stop the Environmental Protection Agency’s assault on small U.S. refineries, which produce roughly 30% of America’s gasoline and diesel.

Longstanding EPA regulations require them to blend renewable fuel into their product or purchase special credits in a marketplace, but most can’t blend in ethanol because it’s too corrosive to be moved through pipelines. The EPA has long solved this problem by routinely granting these refiners exemptions if no credits are available, as provided by law.

Earlier this month, the EPA announced it is essentially ending exemptions and punishing refiners by retroactively denying exemptions back to 2016, requiring the industry to pay billions.

Even the EPA admits consumers will have to cover these costs. Industry leaders fear some refineries won’t be able to operate under the new regime and will instead shut down, reducing the supply of gasoline and diesel still further.

Mr. Biden and his progressive allies wanted to crush the fossil fuel industry. Everything they're doing is to that end and they're succeeding.

Perhaps those who voted for them are delighted every time they pull into the gas station, but I doubt the rest of us are.

Two Questions

SCOTUS, as expected, has overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) as well as Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992). Also, as expected, there's been a lot of outrage on the left and the outrage will probably grow over the weekend.

Amidst all of it people would do well to look for one thing. They should look for any actual argument on the part of those who oppose the Court's Dobbs decision which attempts to show that the Court wrongly decided this case.

Are those who object to Dobbs willing to defend either Roe or Casey as being properly grounded in the Constitution? Is there any Constitutionally based error in the Dobbs opinion written by Samuel Alito or in the concurrence written by Clarence Thomas?

If not, then the majority was correct to overturn the precedents, and all the anger and threats from those who object to the decision are actually demands that the Court abandon its proper role as an adjudicator of the Constitution and take on the role of a legislature.

Whether or not one thinks abortion should be legal everywhere and at any time throughout a pregnancy, if the Constitution does not contain a right to an abortion, if earlier Courts in deciding Roe and Casey manufactured Constitutional rights that don't exist in the document itself, then we have to acknowledge that the current Court, or at least five of its members, did their job.

It's not the responsibility of the Court to do what's popular. It's not the responsibility of the Court to make laws.

It's the responsibility of the Court to ascertain whether a law is compatible with the Constitution, and, on some occasions, to determine whether an earlier ruling was wrongly decided, and then let the political chips fall where they may.

Those who wish the Court to be a legislature actually wish for the United States to turn itself into a third world autocracy. Those who believe that the Constitution means something and that our nation needs to be governed in accord with it have reason today to be grateful.

Misunderstanding Intelligent Design

In a long essay at Skeptic titled Why Christians Should Accept the Theory of Evolution political science professor Larry Arnhart gives a couple of paragraphs to a critique of Intelligent Design (ID) and one of its most prominent advocates, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer.

His article is interesting and covers a lot of important ground, but it's marred, in my opinion, by misunderstandings of ID in the paragraphs I've excerpted below:

To all of this, the intelligent design theorist Stephen Meyer responds by arguing that although he personally believes in biblical revelation, he sees that the case for an Intelligent Designer as an alternative to materialist natural science is best made on purely scientific grounds without any appeal to biblical authority.

He claims that the evidence of science based on our natural observations of the world point to the existence of an Intelligent Designer to explain the appearance of design in the natural world that cannot be explained plausibly by Darwinian evolutionary science.

Meyer’s argument suffers, however, from a fundamental sophistry.

Intelligent design reasoning depends completely on the fallacy of negative argumentation from ignorance, in which intelligent design proponents argue that if evolutionary scientists cannot fully explain the step-by-step evolutionary process by which complex living forms arise, then this proves that these complex forms of life must be caused by the Intelligent Designer.

There are at least two errors in the preceding paragraph. First, Meyer has long been at pains to make clear that the argument for ID is not an argument based on what we don't know but rather is an argument based on what we do know.

To take just one example, what we do know is that blind mechanistic processes do not produce complex specified information such as is found in the molecular machinery and genetic code of living things, but that minds can and frequently do.

Secondly, Meyer, as far as I know, has never said that the inability of evolutionists to demonstrate how living forms arose "proves" that "life must be caused by an Intelligent Designer."

What he and other ID proponents have argued is that the totality of evidence makes ID a more plausible hypothesis than naturalistic evolution. Intelligent agency is, they maintain, the best explanation for the evidence that we see in biology and cosmology.

Arnhart adds this:

This is purely negative reasoning because the proponents of intelligent design are offering no positive explanation of their own as to exactly when, where, and how the Intelligent Designer miraculously caused these forms of life.

Meyer insists that the proponents of evolutionary science satisfy standards of proof that he and his fellow proponents of intelligent design cannot satisfy, because his sophistical strategy is to put the highest burden of proof on his opponents, while refusing to accept that burden of proof for himself.

This is misleading. ID proponents don't demand that naturalistic theorists explain, for instance, when, where and how abiogenesis occurred. What they do ask for is some plausible explanation of how undirected mindless processes could have accomplished it. That challenge has never really been met.

Nor does the inability to explain when, where and how an intelligent agent acted count against a theory that claims that the universe and life are intelligently designed.

As philosopher of science Del Ratszch once wrote, if an exquisitely-shaped titanium obelisk were discovered by the first explorers on Mars none of them would think that because they had no idea who designed it or how, or how it got there, that therefore it wasn't intelligently designed.

The recognition of intelligent agency doesn't require that we know how the agent worked.

I'm frankly surprised that Arnhart raised the objections to ID that he did, given that they've been answered so often by ID proponents in the past.

Hissy Fits

Last week I wrote about Ryan Grim's Intercept article which described the toxic atmosphere that prevails at so many progressive workplaces.

More recently Josh Barro focused specifically on the Washington Post where the atmosphere apparently has reporters at each other's throats.

Barro begins his piece with a discussion of the problem in general:

You may have noticed a bizarre trend at organizations whose staffs are full of younger liberals: Internal disputes aren’t kept internal anymore but are aired in public, on social media or in the press, with rampantly insubordinate staff attacking their colleagues or decrying managerial decisions in full public view — and those actions apparently tolerated from the top.

In the most extreme cases, you get meltdowns like the one at the Dianne Morales campaign for mayor of New York, where staff went on strike to demand, among other things, that the campaign divert part of its budget away from campaigning into “community grocery giveaways.”

But it’s especially a problem in the media, where so many employees have large social media followings they can use to put their employers on blast — and where those employers have (unwisely) cultivated a freewheeling social media culture where it’s common for reporters to comment on all sorts of matters unrelated to their coverage.

Barro then follows with a blow-by-blow description of the infighting at the Post which sounds like nothing so much as a bunch of middle school mean girls throwing tantrums because they don't get their way. You'll have to read the details at the link.

Meanwhile he closes with this interesting remark:

Organizations primarily staffed by conservatives have various problems, but they don’t have this one.

And this phenomenon extends well outside the media, to liberal-staffed nonprofit and political organizations, where leaders are terrified of their employees’ potential outbursts and are therefore letting them run roughshod over strategic goals — and especially over prudent decision-making that might help win elections but do not meet every checkbox of the left-wing keyboard warriors who could cause so much trouble inside and outside the organization.

Fixing this sort of culture isn’t just necessary for making these organizations less miserable places; it’s necessary for building an effective political movement. That’s why, if you’re a liberal, you should care about toxic, anarchic work cultures, even if you don’t personally work at an organization with one.

Perhaps conservatives are on average more mature, better adjusted and less self-absorbed, I don't know, but NRO's Jim Geraghty weighs in with this observation:

But if, as it seems, organizations primarily staffed by conservatives have employees that are generally better team players, we have a fascinating inversion of the expected dynamic.

In a workplace full of folks who classify themselves as rugged individualists, those folks are in fact willing to put aside their personal desires and feelings from 9 to 5 or so, for the sake of participating in a smoothly running, effective organization.

Meanwhile, the workplace full of self-professed collectivists, who believe the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, is increasingly debilitated by runaway narcissism, petty infighting, and self-absorbed grievance-mongering.

It makes one wonder how "collectivist" these people are, how much they actually care about the masses, when their behavior suggests that what they really think is that everything is "all about me."

Why Is Belief in God Fading?

Yesterday's post left off with this question: If the evidence for the existence of God is stronger today than ever before why is theism, i.e. the belief that there is a personal creator of the universe, declining, especially among the young?

Here are a few possible reasons:

1. Bad experience with one's father.
As Freud observed the relationship one has with one's father often affects the relationship one has with other father figures like God. A disastrous father/child relationship often makes it very difficult for the child to ever see God as a loving, forgiving father.

Bitterness and resentment toward a biological father can stifle any desire on the part of the child, once grown, to embrace anything suggesting a father, and there's probably never been a time in our history when young people, people under 40, have been more estranged from their fathers.

2. Bad experience with a church, or
3. The doctrine of Christian exclusivism. These two, although they may be offered as reasons for one's atheism are, in fact, not very good reasons to reject theism. They may partially account for one's disbelief in Christian theism, but they're very weak reasons for rejecting even that. A bad experience with a church is self-explanatory.

Christian exclusivism refers to the doctrine held by many Christians (although far from all) that only Christians will be granted eternal life. Some find this doctrine intolerably narrow and chauvinistic and conclude that therefore there is no God.

4. The belief that science disproves God's existence.
This one is ironic since of the fifty or so men who initiated the scientific revolution from the late 17th to the early 19th centuries almost all of them were theists. It also reflects a misunderstanding of what science is.

There's no conflict between science and theism. There is indeed a conflict between theism and naturalism, the belief that only nature exists and that there is no supernature, but this is a metaphysical belief, not an essential part of science.

Naturalism may be the preferred metaphysics of a majority of scientists, especially in the biological sciences, but metaphysics is a branch of philosophy, not science.

5. The fact of human suffering.
Many people find it difficult to reconcile the existence of God with the horrific suffering that exists in the lives of so many people. I offer a series of three posts explaining this problem and why I don't think it works as a logical argument against theism. The interested reader can find them here, here and here.

6. God's "hiddenness."
Some non-believers doubt that there could be a good God who chooses not to reveal Himself in a fashion that would remove all question about His existence. Why, they ask, does God remain silent if He cares about the chaos, terror and pain in the world? This is an objection to theism similar in some ways to #5. Here's a post offering a response to it.

7. The deep desire that theism not be true.
In my opinion this is the main reason why most people who disdain theism do so, but it's not just my opinion. Consider these quotes from some famous atheists:

Philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote in his book The Last Word: "I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.

Friedrich Nietzsche says in The Gay Science: "What decides against Christianity now is our taste, not our reasons."

Aldous Huxley, in his book Ends and Means, admits that: “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know."

It's interesting that none of the great atheistic thinkers of the 19th or 20th centuries ever offered a compelling argument for the non-existence of God. Neither Freud, nor Marx nor Sartre ever put together a logical rationale for their unbelief. They simply assumed that theism was no longer a viable hypothesis.

In other words, most people who don't believe in God don't do so because of argument or evidence but for emotional reasons.

Unbelief is, in many cases at least, an act of Freudian wish fulfillment.

Belief in God Is at Its Lowest Point Ever

A recent Gallup poll finds that belief in God is at a historic low in the U.S. Although believers still constitute a majority (81%) that figure is down six percentage points since 2017.

Between 1944 and 2011, more than 90% of Americans believed in God. In the 1950s and 1960s those claiming to believe in God were consistently at 98%. By 2011, 92% of Americans still said they believed in God.

Actually, the 81% who claim to believe is misleading since it appears to conflate theists, who believe that God is a personal being who can and does intervene in history, and deists who believe that God is impersonal and/or unable or unwilling to intervene in the world.

In fact, according to the poll only 42% of all Americans would qualify as theists. Of the remainder of those polled who said that they believed in God 28% of them hold that God hears prayers but cannot intervene, while 11% think God does neither (17% of respondents say they do not believe in God and would be considered atheists).

In other words, 39% of Americans believe in the existence of a deity which is largely irrelevant to their lives other than, perhaps, to hold people accountable for their mode of life after their death and/or to serve as some sort of guarantor of eternal life.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, belief in God has fallen the most among young adults and people on the left of the political spectrum (liberals and Democrats). These groups show drops of 10 or more percentage points from the average of the 2013-2017 polls.

Most other key subgroups have experienced at least a modest decline, but it's perhaps noteworthy that conservatives and married adults have had essentially no change.

The groups with the largest declines are also the groups that are currently least likely to believe in God, including liberals (62%), young adults (68%) and Democrats (72%). Belief in God is highest among political conservatives (94%) and Republicans (92%).

Slightly more than half of conservatives and Republicans are theists, but only 25% of liberals, 32% of Democrats and 30% of young adults are (Check out the charts which display this data at the link).

There's a real irony in all of this, in my opinion. Belief in a personal God seems to be waning at a time when the case for the existence of a personal God has never been stronger. Almost every new discovery in cosmology and biology either supports, or at least doesn't conflict with, the belief that an intelligent, purposeful agent is behind the creation and architecture of the cosmos and of life.

The ubiquity of talk of human rights, justice and moral duties in our contemporary culture necessarily assumes some transcendent ground for these. Apart from any such foundation this talk is sheer emotivism.

The existential yearning for meaning and the desire to live beyond physical death, all impress upon us the conclusion that either these things have no real satisfaction, in which case life truly is a Shakespearian tale told by an idiot signifying nothing, or they do have an ultimate satisfaction, in which case there is very probably a personal God.

The phenomenon of human consciousness, which seems inexplicable on any naturalistic, materialistic hypothesis, is a flashing neon sign telling us that we're not just material beings.

There are additional reasons to think that theism is true and that it's a much more powerful explanation of what we experience in and of the world than is naturalism. I explored some of those reasons in a series of five posts in November of 2020. The first is here and the rest appear on subsequent days.

I also explained why I believe Christian theism in particular is reasonable in a pair of posts from last January. You can read Part I here and Part II here.

So, if I'm right about this why is theistic belief trending downward? Surely there are numerous reasons, most of which have nothing at all to do with the plausibility or rationality of theistic belief. I'll consider some of what I think to be the chief reasons tomorrow.

How Did This Ever Evolve?

The problem, of course, is not with explaining how the phenomenon in the video could have evolved, but rather how it could have evolved as a result of a blind, undirected, purposeless process.

Doubtless the phenomenon could conceivably have been designed by an intelligent engineer, just as intelligent engineers have evolved computers from abacuses and fighter jets from Flyer, the first plane flown by the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk.

But it's hard to imagine how fighter jets could have evolved from Flyer (or, a forteriori, how Flyer itself could have evolved) through sheer serendipity.

Anyway, watch the video. It's pretty amazing.

On Fathers' Day

When David Blankenhorn's Fatherless America came out in 1995 it became an instant classic on the importance of men to the well-being of the American family.

Blankenhorn said many things in that book that needed to be said, especially after our society had suffered through two decades of radical feminism with its relentless downplaying of the need for traditional two-parent families, and even though the book came out over two decades ago, what he said in 1995 needs saying as much today as it did then.

Recall Gloria Steinem's aphorism that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." It turned out that women and children both need men, at least fathers, as much as a fish needs water.

Tomorrow is Father's Day in the U.S. so today might be a good time to remind ourselves of some of the key points Blankenhorn illuminates in Fatherless America.

He tells us, for instance, that men need to be fathers. Fatherhood is society's most important role for men. More than any other activity it helps men become good men. Fathers are more likely to obey the law, to be good citizens, and to care about the needs of others.

Men who remain single are more likely than those who marry to die young, or commit crimes, or both (This is a point also made by George Gilder in his equally fine 1986 book Men and Marriage which I heartily recommend).

Children need fathers as protectors. Eighty-four percent of all cases of non-parental child abuse occur in single parent homes and of these cases, 64% of them occur at the hands of mom's boyfriend. Statistically speaking, teenage girls are far safer in the company of their father than in the company of any other man.

Children need fathers as providers. Fatherlessness is the single most powerful determinant of childhood poverty. Regardless of how poverty is measured, single women with children are the poorest of all demographic groups. Children who come from two-parent families are much more likely to inherit wealth from paternal grandparents, much more likely to get financial support at an age when they're going to school, buying a home, or starting their own families than children from single parent homes.

The economic fault line in this country doesn't run between races, it runs between those families in which fathers are present and those in which they are not.

Children need fathers as role models. Boys raised by a traditionally masculine father are much less likely to commit crimes, whereas boys raised without a father are much more likely to do poorly in school and wind up in prison or dead.

Valuing fatherhood has to be instilled in boys from a young age by a masculine father. Commitment to one woman and to their children is not something that comes naturally to men.

It's almost impossible, for instance, to find a culture in which women voluntarily abandon their children in large numbers, but to find a culture in which men in large numbers voluntarily abandon their children all one need do is look around.

Boys who grow up without fathers are statistically more likely to become louts, misogynistic, abusive, authoritarian, and violent. Girls who grow up without fathers are more likely to become promiscuous. A society in which a father is little more than a sperm donor is a society of fourteen year-old girls with babies and fourteen year-old boys with guns.

Stepfathers and boyfriends (Blankenhorn calls them "nearby guys") cannot replace the biological father. For stepfathers and boyfriends the main object of desire and commitment, to the extent these exist, is the mother, not the child. For the married father this distinction hardly exists. The married father says "My mate, my child". The stepfather and boyfriend must say "My mate, the other guy's child".

Children are a glue for biological parents that serves to hold them together, but they're a wedge between non-biological parents, tending to be a source of tension which pushes them apart.

Fatherhood means fathers teaching children a way of life, which is the heart of what it is to be a father. More than providing for their material needs, or shielding them from harm, or even caring for them and showing them affection, paternal sponsorship means cultural transmission - endowing children with competence and character by showing them how to live a certain kind of life.

One wishes every man - and woman - would read Blankenhorn's Fatherless America. It's loaded with great insight.

Red Flag Difficulties

The Federalist's David Harsanyi poses an interesting thought experiment on "Red Flag" laws.

Citing a journalistic organization (Poynter) that's eager to see Congress enact laws that would allow authorities to take guns from gun owners who are accused of being a threat either to themselves or others, Harsanyi invites us to...

...imagine a law that empowered a court to temporarily nullify the free speech rights of journalists who are accused by a third party of being potentially dangerous. Let’s imagine that the nullification could be enforced before the journalist even had a chance to respond to any of the allegations leveled against them.

Would Poynter argue that the proper standard of due process was met? Because that’s what numerous red flag laws allow.

Let’s then imagine that this law demands the journalist prove their innocence, rather than the state prove their guilt, before reinstating First Amendment rights. And until the journalist can offer a compelling enough argument to convince a judge that they would not commit a crime in the future, the state would continue to strip them of their rights.

Would Poynter argue that such a law lacked proper due process? (Considering journalism’s embrace of censorship, perhaps not.)

Let’s imagine now that the law also allowed the free speech rights of journalists to be canceled, not over a pre-crime, but because of “overblown political rhetoric” — as the ACLU, hardly the NRA, warned about Rhode Island’s red flag law.

Does Poynter believe people who are offended by, say, social media posts should be able to petition a judge to shut down the rights of individuals? Does that law meet the proper standard of due process? (Again, these days, I’d be nervous to hear the answer.)

Or let’s imagine that the law also permits cops to show up at the home of the journalist, search it, and demand they hand over property, without offering any evidence that they committed, or ever planned to commit, a crime.

Do laws that allow the authorities to circumvent normal evidentiary standards and procedures to help in investigations meet Poynter’s acceptable standard of due process? Because red flag laws allow for that kind of abuse.

Whether it’s the First or Second Amendment, the underlying due process arguments remain the same. It’s one thing — an authoritarian thing, for sure — to argue that some of our rights are so dangerous that we should now ignore fundamental Constitutional protections, but it’s another thing to claim that even pointing out this reality is “misinformation.”

One difficulty with Red Flag laws, which I think most people support in principle, is the matter of codifying the sort of accusations against a gun owner that'll be required to justify taking a person's firearms. Another is assessing the credibility of the person making the accusation that a gun owner is a threat.

Should one's constitutional right to own a firearm be abridged on allegations from a disgruntled ex-spouse or neighbor?

Consider what's called the "boyfriend loophole."

Currently, domestic abusers are barred by federal law from owning guns if they were married to, lived with, or had a child with their victim, but what about someone who abuses his girlfriend but doesn’t live with her?

The bipartisan group of senators attempting to craft a red flag bill may be struggling with how to define the scope of a relationship such that domestic violence committed within its parameters is grounds for losing one’s Second Amendments.

Should the “boyfriend loophole” apply only to romantic relationships? If so, how many dates are needed before we should worry about violence in the aftermath of a break-up?

How much credence should authorities give to a girlfriend's allegations of abuse that have not yet been proven in court?

These are all difficult questions and any legislation that fails to explicitly answer them bears considerable potential for abuse and should be rejected.

Progressives' Internecine Warfare

It's a matter of historical fact that extremists, perhaps especially leftists, often wind up devouring their own. Something like that appears to be happening in Progressive organizations across the country according to a lengthy essay by Ryan Grim at The Intercept.

Internal tensions have plagued the pro-abortion Guttmacher institute, Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Sierra Club, the National Audubon Society, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement, Netflix, the Washington Post, New York Times and many other organizations which have seen "wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years."

Grim describes them as having been embroiled in "knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines. It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function."

In fact, he claims, "it’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult."

Here are some excerpts from his essay that'll help readers get an appreciation for the problem he discusses:

The executive directors [of several organizations] largely spoke on the condition of anonymity, for fear of angering staff or donors.

“To be honest with you, this is the biggest problem on the left over the last six years,” one concluded. “This is so big. And it’s like abuse in the family — it’s the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about. And you have to be super sensitive about who the messengers are.”

“We’re dealing with a workforce that’s becoming younger, more female, more people of color, more politically woke — I hate to use that term in a way it shouldn’t be used — and less loyal in the traditional way to a job, because the whole economic rationale for keeping a job or having a job has changed.”

For years, recruiting young people into the movement felt like a win-win, he said: new energy for the movement and the chance to give a person a lease on a newly liberated life, dedicated to the pursuit of justice. But that’s no longer the case. “I got to a point like three years ago where I had a crisis of faith, like, I don’t even know, most of these spaces on the left are just not — they’re not healthy."

"Like all these people are just not — they’re not doing well,” he said. “The dynamic, the toxic dynamic of whatever you want to call it — callout culture, cancel culture, whatever — is creating this really intense thing, and no one is able to acknowledge it, no one’s able to talk about it, no one’s able to say how bad it is.”

Grim cites one explanation for this dysfunction:

A looming sense of powerlessness on the left nudged the focus away from structural or wide-reaching change, which felt out of reach, and replaced it with an internal target that was more achievable. “Maybe I can’t end racism by myself, but I can get my manager fired, or I can get so and so removed, or I can hold somebody accountable,” one former executive director said.

“People found power where they could, and often that’s where you work, sometimes where you live, or where you study, but someplace close to home.”

When employees trash their employers it evidently makes them feel empowered. This must be especially appealing to people who yearn for power and have so little.

Too much hype about what was possible electorally also played a role, said another leader. “Unrealistic expectations about what could be achieved through the electoral and legislative process has led us to give up on persuasion and believe convenient myths that we can change everything by ‘mobilizing’ a mythological ‘base,’” he said.

“This has led to navel-gazing and constant rehashing of internal culture debates, because the progressive movement is no longer convinced it can have an impact on the external world.”

The process of seeking to destroy one's ideological siblings is not new, apparently:

The 1970s were a brutal period in activist spaces, documented most famously in a 1976 Ms. Magazine article and a subsequent book by feminist Jo Freeman, both called “Trashing: The Dark Side of Sisterhood.” “What is ‘trashing,’” she asks, “this colloquial term that expresses so much, yet explains so little?”

It is not disagreement; it is not conflict; it is not opposition. These are perfectly ordinary phenomena which, when engaged in mutually, honestly, and not excessively, are necessary to keep an organism or organization healthy and active.

Trashing is a particularly vicious form of character assassination which amounts to psychological rape. It is manipulative, dishonest, and excessive. It is occasionally disguised by the rhetoric of honest conflict, or covered up by denying that any disapproval exists at all.

But it is not done to expose disagreements or resolve differences. It is done to disparage and destroy.

I'll close with this passage:

Executive directors across the space said they too have tried to organize their hiring process to filter out the most disruptive potential staff. “I’m now at a point where the first thing I wonder about a job applicant is, ‘How likely is this person to blow up my organization from the inside?’” said one, echoing a refrain heard repeatedly during interviews for this story.

(One executive director noted that their group’s high-profile association with a figure considered in social justice spaces to be problematic had gone from a burden to a boon, as the man now serves as an accidental screen, filtering out activists who’d be most likely to focus their energy on internal fights rather than the organization’s mission.)

There's much more in Grim's column. Grim himself is a man of the left and is presumably not happy with the dirty laundry that he's reporting on.

Conservatives, on the other hand, will doubtless feel a certain schadenfreude at the collapse of organizations whose mission and whose wokeness are both inimical, often, to the best long-term interests of the country.

Is Wokeism in Retreat?

Andrew Sullivan may be indulging in wishful thinking, but he makes a pretty good case that the tide is turning in our culture and that "wokeism" is in retreat. He begins with a recounting of recent history:

We’re now two years out from what may in retrospect be seen as peak “social justice.”

In the summer of 2020, a hefty section of the elite was enthralled with the idea of the police being defunded, demobilized and demonized. Critical theory’s critique of liberal democracy as a mere mask for “white supremacy” [was] everywhere. Countless people were required to read woke tracts — from DiAngelo to Kendi — as part of their employment.

Corporate America jumped in, shedding any pretense of political neutrality; mainstream media swiftly adopted the new language and premises of critical theory....

But now look where we are.

Last year, Eric Adams became mayor of New York City, propelled by minority voters horrified by surging crime and chaos.

This past week, DA Chesa Boudin, scion of leftwing terrorists, was ousted by minority voters in San Francisco, after he allowed much of the city to become a chaotic hellhole in pursuit of “racial justice.”

Recent polling suggests a sea-change in attitudes. Pew found that only three percent of African-Americans put “racism/diversity/culture” as the most important issue to them while 17 percent cited “violence/crime,” and 11 percent said “economic issues.” (Among Democrats overall , “49% now view racism as a major problem, down from 67% about a year ago.”)

New York City voters now put “crime” ahead of “racial inequality” as their most urgent concern by a huge ratio of 12:1 . Polling in San Francisco found that 67 percent of Asian-Americans wanted Boudin gone — a sign that the Democrats’ ascendant coalition of non-whites is now fast-descendant.

Hispanics also appear to be fleeing the left. In the usually Dem-friendly Quinnipiac poll last month , “48% of Hispanic registered voters said they wanted Republicans to take control of the House of Representatives, while just 34% said they wanted Democrats in power.

In addition, 49% of Hispanic voters said they wanted the GOP to win the Senate, while 36% said they wanted Democrats to remain in control of the chamber.”

Biden’s approval among Hispanics is now 24 percent . I’m not sure what to make of this, but even if it’s half true, it’s an electoral emergency for Democrats.

Some Dem pols have noticed the vast cultural gap between most Latino voters and wealthy white leftists, and adjusted. Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres last week criticized the use of the absurd term “Latinx” — because denying the sex binary is not exactly integral to a culture where the language itself is divided into masculine and feminine....

Elite imposition of the new social justice religion — indoctrinating children in the precepts and premises of critical race and gender theory — has also met ferocious backlash as parents began to absorb what their kids were being taught: that America is a uniquely evil country based forever on white supremacy; that your race is the most important thing about you; that biological sex must be replaced by socially constructed genders of near-infinite number; and that all this needs to be taught in kindergarten....if you think there is no there there in this concern about schooling, you’re dreaming.

Across the country, school boards are thereby in turmoil, with those supporting less ideological education on the march. On the question of trans rights, there is broad support for inclusion — but most Americans are understandably uncomfortable with pre-pubescent kids having irreversible sex changes, and with trans women competing with women in sports....

Sullivan goes on to talk about recent events at the "wokest of woke newspapers," the Washington Post, involving emotionally labile reporters Felicia Sonmez and Taylor Lorenz. Read it at the link. It's all very interesting.

I'm not as optimistic as Sullivan, though, that the cultural tide is turning, but I hope he's right that people have had enough.

Yet as someone pointed out not long ago, in a contest between those who are willing to fight and those who just want to be left alone, those who fight will win. Too many Americans, I fear, just want to be left alone and don't realize that that's not an option those willing to fight will give them.

Disagreement by Death Threat

Yesterday's post made the point that a secular society can offer no convincing argument against the claim that political assassination of those deemed to be harming others or democracy is morally wrong.

An irony of this is that a sure way to harm or even snuff out democracy is to be willing to resort to murder in order to try to save it.

Today's post presents an example of people using the threat of violence to intimidate those with whom they disagree: The Daily Wire's Matt Walsh has been receiving death threats for having made what is, by all accounts, a devastating documentary on today's transgender movement.

The film is titled "What Is a Woman" and is available at the Daily Wire but requires a subscription. Here's the trailer:

Matt Walsh describes Scott Newgent as the hero of the film. Newgent is a biological woman who at 42 transitioned to male. Her experience was horrific. Here's part of her interview with Walsh:

During my own transition, I had seven surgeries.

I also had a massive pulmonary embolism, a helicopter life-flight ride, an emergency ambulance ride, a stress-induced heart attack, sepsis, a 17-month recurring infection due to using the wrong skin during a (failed) phalloplasty, 16 rounds of antibiotics, three weeks of daily IV antibiotics, the loss of all my hair, (only partially successful) arm reconstructive surgery, permanent lung and heart damage, a cut bladder, insomnia-induced hallucinations—oh, and frequent loss of consciousness due to pain from the hair on the inside of my urethra.

All this led to a form of PTSD that made me a prisoner in my apartment for a year. Between me and my insurance company, medical expenses exceeded $900,000.

Here's the video excerpt:

You can read more about Newgent and "What Is a Woman" in a column by Rod Dreher at The American Conservative.

For some reason we don't hear much about cases like Newgent's or these potential consequences of transition surgery from our media, yet it wasn't too long ago that we were inundated with public service announcements about the risks of tobacco usage. If it was proper to warn the public about the potential evils of tobacco why the silence concerning transition surgery?

Perhaps it's because anyone who points them out is often threatened with death by odious individuals who believe that any behavior is justified, no matter how heinous, as long as it produces a "win" for their side.

One litmus test for determining which side of a debate has the best arguments is to look at which side feels it necessary to resort to threats. Threats of violence are a tacit admission that facts and reason are not on one's side.

Alarming Poll

The arrest of Nicholas John Roske for the attempted murder of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh recalls to mind a poll commissioned last April by the far left Southern Poverty Law Center. The poll assessed the attitudes of Americans toward political assassination, and the results are very disturbing.

Here's a chart that summarizes the findings:

Notice that the allegation that political violence is favored mostly by individuals on the "far-right" is not supported by the poll. Among young males - men under 50 - more men who identify as Democrats believe assassination is justified if someone is "harming the country or our democracy" than do Republicans.

Of course, what constitutes harm is in the eye of the beholder. Many, like Mr. Roske, believe that upholding the 2nd Amendment and overturning Roe v. Wade satisfy the harm criterion and justify murder.

Surprisingly, even among younger females the numbers are alarming. Forty percent of Republican women and 32 percent of Democratic women approve of political assassinations according to the SPLC's poll!

The fact that a substantial minority of people under 50, whether Democrat or Republican, endorse political murder as a means to solving problems tells us something significant, and distressing, about the last couple of generations of Americans.

In the last fifty years we've become an increasingly secular society, and a secular society lacks the resources for instilling in the young a duty to treat others with dignity, respect and kindness. It lacks the resources to insist that some behaviors are objectively wrong.

Having largely abandoned the idea of a Divine judgment and ultimate accountability, a secular society is morally adrift. To the extent that it can assess right and wrong at all it often does so by employing pragmatic criteria - an act is right if it works to produce some desired end.

Thus, if murdering one's political adversaries enables one to prevent the implementation of undesirable policies then assassination is ethically justified.

Untethered to any source of transcendent morality and duty it's easy for politicians to justify lying, slandering, bribery, even murder, as long as they can avoid being found out.

A society which no longer believes in God - a society in which individuals no longer believe they have a duty to obey an objective moral law, indeed, in which they no longer believe there even is an objective moral law, a society in which they no longer believe they'll be held accountable for the life they've lived - is a society in which a lot of people will find nothing especially wrong with killing their political enemies.

Camus, Sartre and Theistic Conversion

Twentieth century French existentialists were known for their atheism. Two prominent examples of the breed were Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, but since their deaths a number of rumors have spread that both men may have rejected atheism toward the end of their lives.

Actually, in the case of Camus it's a bit more than a rumor. An elderly pastor by the name of Howard Mumma wrote a book in 2000, forty years after the automobile crash that took Camus' life, in which he claims to recount a series of meetings with the famous writer.

Camus was allegedly open to the answers Christianity offers to questions about the meaning of human existence and was so intrigued by his discussions with Mumma that he actually requested to be baptized.

Camus died before the baptism occurred, but, according to Mumma, he died a theist and possibly a Christian.

The book is titled Albert Camus and the Minister. Only the first 90 pages or so deal with the author's conversations with Camus, and I have no idea whether Mumma was accurately recounting those conversations.

It does seem, however, that they had some sort of relationship with each other that Camus was interested in developing.

As for Sartre, who died in 1980, there seems to be reason to think that he, too, may have repudiated the atheism he embraced throughout his adult life.

From the link:

The one who revealed Sartre’s astonishing change was his friend and ex-Maoist, Pierre Victor (A.k.a. Benny Levy), who spent much of his time with the dying Sartre and interviewed him on several of his views.

According to Victor, Sartre had a drastic change of mind about the existence of god and started gravitating toward Messianic Judaism.

This is Sartre’s before-death profession, according to Pierre Victor: “I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to god.”

Others have vigorously disputed Victor's account, and the truth will probably never be ascertained. It is the case, however, that his long time paramour, Simone de Beauvoir, was angry with Sartre for some sort of betrayal in his last days, referring to a "descent into superstition" and the "senile act of a turncoat."

Whether she was speaking of a death bed conversion to theism or not is unclear.

There are lots of urban legends of death bed conversions of atheists, and what they all have in common, unfortunately, is that there's no way to confirm them. It's best, therefore, not to give them more weight than the evidence allows.

Nevertheless, the evidence in both cases is suggestive.

A line from Camus is intriguing. One source claims that in his novel titled The Happy Death, Camus wrote that "Death has the power and audacity to change one's beliefs."

If the quote is accurate it may also be prescient.

The Left's Resort to Violence

The arrest this week of an armed twenty six year-old man outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a man who claimed he wanted to kill Kavanaugh in order to give his life meaning, has raised fears that the left's resort to violence seems to be intensifying.

Not content to burn our cities, the left has, since the leak of the draft of the forthcoming Supreme Court decision in the Dobbs case on May 2nd, directed its penchant for violence toward churches, crisis pregnancy centers and now even Supreme Court Justices and their families.

Throughout these malicious acts of vandalism and terror President Biden has been relatively silent, much more silent than he presumably would have been had the assailant been a right-winger out to kill a liberal Justice. His reticence is bad enough, but other Democrats have been worse than reticent.

For example, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, explicitly threatened two Supreme Court Justices by name on March 4, 2020 thus giving tacit encouragement for those who would resort to violence in protest of any move to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The Senator, speaking on the steps of the Supreme Court building fulminated:

I want to tell you [Justice] Gorsuch, I want to tell you [Justice] Kavanaugh, you have unleashed the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.

This rhetoric is surely much more inciteful than anything Donald Trump said on January 6th, 2021, but the left is defending it.

In any case, Schumer's hardly alone. The left has been creating a climate of hysteria and violence over the issue of abortion ever since it became clear that the Roe decision was in jeopardy.

A piece by Tristan Justice in The Federalist chronicles a few examples:

California Congressman Eric Swalwell told followers to “fight like your lives depend on it.” “Because they do,” he added.

Missouri Congresswoman Cori Bush wrote on Twitter that Democrats needed to “protect abortion rights by any means necessary.” (Italics mine) “This is an emergency,” she said.

New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand urged followers on Twitter to “fight like hell” to save abortion more than a year after she voted in favor of President Donald Trump’s impeachment conviction over [his use of] identical language.

Justice notes that,

Churches and pro-life pregnancy centers have already suffered multiple fire bombings by pro-abortion radicals since the draft opinion was leaked.

Authorities launched an arson investigation in New York after a Buffalo pregnancy center was set ablaze by individuals who graffitied “Jane Was Here.” The words refer to the abortion terrorist organization Jane’s Revenge.

In mid-May, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson demanded federal law enforcement draft plans to protect pro-life groups from domestic threats after one such group was hit with a Molotov cocktail in Madison.

“In 2020, extremists exploited demonstrations across the country to incite riots that resulted in the loss of life, more than 2,000 injuries to law enforcement officers, and over $1 billion in property damage,” Johnson wrote in the May 13 letter as activists descended on Justices’ homes.

“There are currently mobs outside of the residences of the Supreme Court Justices appointed by Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump … and, once again, DOJ, FBI, and DHS have yet to condemn these activities.”

Johnson gave Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas until May 27 to respond.

Johnson Spokeswoman Alexa Henning told The Federalist on Wednesday, however, “we have not yet received a substantive response to our letter to DHS, FBI, or DOJ on designating Jane’s Revenge a domestic terrorism group, investigating the Madison attack, and protecting pro-life organizations.”

Meanwhile, a bill that would fund increased security for SCOTUS Justices and their families had been held up for in the House by Speaker Nancy Pelosi who finally got around to putting it up for a vote next week.

The bill passed the Senate by unanimous consent in May, but Ms. Pelosi, for whatever reason, stalled it in the House until the arrest of the would-be assassin outside Justice Kavanaugh's home made her dilatory tactics look irresponsible. Now she's allowing the legislation to move along.

The point, though, is that nihilistic violence is in the left's DNA. It's been part of their modus operandi ever since 1789 and the subsequent French Terror. Whenever they don't get their way, whenever they see an opportunity to destabilize society, they'll either resort to it or tacitly condone its use by others.

Biden's Team

In an NRO column Jim Geraghty explains the staff problems every president faces but which especially beset our current president:

When a new president comes to town, everyone is eager to work in his administration or cabinet. People will walk away from lucrative and prestigious jobs for the opportunity to have a key role in a new presidency.

At the beginning of his first term, the president’s political capital and influence with Congress is at its highest, the air is full of optimism and energy, and he has his pick of the very best talent in the country.

The president’s first staff and cabinet are his “A Team.”

But working in the White House or in a top-level cabinet position means long hours and a relentless pace, with a lot to do against the ticking clock of the midterm elections. About two years later, the president has usually done a ton of work and had a rough midterm. The “A Team” gets burned out and is ready to move on to more lucrative private-sector roles.

The “B Team” — the deputies and assistants and people who came in second during the interviews before the inauguration — usually step in sometime around the second or third year.

If a president is lucky enough to win a second term, well, then the “B team” is ready to depart to corporate consulting, lobbying, academia, writing their memoirs, and stepping into their media gigs.

At the start of the second term, the “C Team” takes over. These folks usually aren’t the best, but they’re loyal, and they’ve kept their noses to the grindstone for four years. They’ve earned their promotions, even if they might be in a little over their heads.

And after the second midterm — which usually goes badly as well — well, by then, the “C Team” is ready to move on and the party’s top rising talent is really focused on who’s going to be the next nominee for president.

So, by year seven of a two-term presidency, the increasingly exhausted president is left with the metaphorical dregs of whoever’s still around and willing to do the job — the “D Team.”

A White House is much less likely to recruit top-tier figures from Capitol Hill, the corporate world, academia, or other fields at this point in an administration’s life cycle. They’re asking these potential recruits to walk away from good jobs to spend two years in an administration that gets less attention and coverage than the Iowa caucuses or Super Tuesday.

As Victor Davis Hanson points out in a piece titled A Cabinet of Dunces, Mr. Biden's administration is already loaded with people who are unsuited for the role they've been given.

Hanson discusses the ineptitude of much of Biden's cabinet - Merrick Garland, Pete Buttigieg, Deb Haaland, Lloyd Austin, Alejandro Mayorkis, Jennifer Granholm. By the time the reader reaches the conclusion, he or she is ready to despair for the country.

Hanson concludes with these words:

The common denominator to these Biden appointees is ideological rigidity, nonchalance, and sheer incompetence.

They seem indifferent to the current border, inflation, energy, and crime disasters. When confronted, they are unable to answer simple questions from Congress, or they mock anyone asking for answers on behalf of the strapped American people.

We don’t know why or how such an unimpressive cadre ended up running the government, only that they are here and the American people are suffering from their presence.

If we add Mr. Biden's current press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, to the mix, it seems as if Mr. Biden, at less than two years into his presidency, has already stuck us with the "D Team."

Two Political Disadvantages

The editor of The New Republic, Michael Tomasky, has written an insightful essay in which he critiques his party's (Democrat) messaging. But before he gets to the Democrats' woeful inability to articulate a compelling case for why they're good for the country he notes that there are three structural difficulties or disadvantages that plague Democrats.

The first two are especially interesting and perhaps surprising. He writes:

Structural difficulty number one: There just aren’t as many liberals as there are conservatives in the United States. Gallup asks people this question most years. In the 2020 edition, 36 percent of respondents called themselves conservative, 35 percent moderate, and 25 percent liberal. And that 25 is way up from the 1990s, when the liberal number was around 17, 18, and the conservative number was more like 38.

This never-discussed fact explains a lot. It means that Democrats have to do a lot more reaching beyond their base than conservatives do. And it helps explain why Republicans are constantly trying to out-conservative one another and Democrats, with very rare exceptions, never even use the word “liberal.”

This exasperates me to no end, but seeing these numbers, I can kind of understand it. If those numbers were reversed, Democrats would be saying liberal this and liberal that all day, and conservatives would be all hamina-hamina at candidate forums when the moderator asked them if they’d call themselves conservative.

Tomasky is exasperated because he is himself very liberal and edits a liberal journal, and he makes a good point when he observes that Democrats rarely call themselves liberals. It's not because they're not liberal but rather because they don't want the general public to know that they are.

His next point is also noteworthy:

Structural difficulty number two: Not quite half of Democrats are liberal. Here’s a Pew result from early 2020 in which Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents were asked their preferred ideological label.

Leading the pack? Moderate, 38 percent. Liberal came in at 32 percent, very liberal at 15 (way up from the single digits 20 years ago), while conservative and very conservative combined for 14 percent (conservative Democrats tend to be more religious).

Compare to Republicans: In most surveys I’ve seen, about two-thirds of Republicans, maybe even 70 percent, say they’re conservative, with most of the remainder moderate, and a very confused 4 percent or so liberal.

Mull those numbers. There are roughly as many conservatives in the Democratic coalition as there are “very liberals.” That Republicans are overwhelmingly conservative makes their messaging challenges much easier to surmount.

It also means, and this is a very important point, that there’s no divide between the GOP base and the political class, which is obviously not true of Democrats. The Democratic political class is, for the most part, very liberal, which means that the political elites embrace a number of cultural left positions that aren’t even particularly popular among the Democratic rank and file, let alone independent voters. (Economically populist positions, however, are popular, as evidenced by how well the constituent elements of Build Back Better polled.)

Again, these numbers are very under-discussed in our discourse, but they explain a lot.

Yes, but what they don't explain is why liberals control both houses of the legislature and the White House. If the nation is basically conservative how do liberals keep getting elected to office?

Is it that the average voter, not to mention the average non-voter, though conservative, is woefully ignorant of the politics of the people he or she votes for? And if these citizens are non-voters, are they so apathetic about the course of the country that, though they are instinctively conservative, they just don't care enough to vote?

Either possibility portends ill for the future of our nation. To quote Thomas Jefferson "Any nation that expects to remain ignorant (or apathetic) and free, expects what never was and never will be."

Born That Way

One of the seminal thinkers in modern feminism, the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, wrote in her famous book The Second Sex (1949) that a woman is not born a woman but rather chooses to become one.

Is that also true of sexuality in general? Are LGBTQ individuals, for example, genetically determined - "born that way" - or do they ultimately choose their sexual orientation and expression?

A paper by political scientist Eric Kaufmann sheds light on the question.

Kaufmann has collated the results of numerous studies of LGBT identification and behavior and has come up with some interesting conclusions. Here's a summary of his findings:

• The last decade has seen a precipitous rise in the share of Americans identifying as LGBT, particularly among the youngest adults. Today, among those under 30, a wide range of surveys converge on a number of around 20%. Government data from Canada and the UK indicate that surveys might be overestimating the extent of the rise in LGBT identity. This caveat must be kept in mind in understanding this report. Nonetheless, these government sources indicate that the trend is real, even if less reliable surveys might exaggerate it.
• The most popular LGBT identity is bisexual, which is significantly more common among women than men.
• When we look at homosexual behavior, we find that it has grown much less rapidly than LGBT identification. Men and women under 30 who reported a sexual partner in the last five years dropped from around 96% exclusively heterosexual in the 1990s to 92% exclusively heterosexual in 2021. Whereas in 2008 attitudes and behavior were similar, by 2021 LGBT identification was running at twice the rate of LGBT sexual behavior.
• The author provides a high-point estimate of an 11-point increase in LGBT identity between 2008 and 2021 among Americans under 30. Of that, around 4 points can be explained by an increase in same-sex behavior. The majority of the increase in LGBT identity can be traced to how those who only engage in heterosexual behavior describe themselves.
• Very liberal ideology is associated with identifying as LGBT among those with heterosexual behavior, especially women. It seems that an underlying psychological disposition is inclining people with heterosexual behavior to identify both as LGBT and very liberal. The most liberal respondents have moved from 10-15% non-heterosexual identification in 2016 to 33% in 2021. Other ideological groups are more stable.
• Very liberal ideology and LGBT identification are associated with anxiety and depression in young people. Very liberal young Americans are twice as likely as others to experience these problems. 27% of young Americans with anxiety or depression were LGBT in 2021. This relationship appears to have strengthened since 2010.
• Among young people, mental health problems, liberal ideology, and LGBT identity are strongly correlated. Using factor analysis in two different studies shows that assuming one common variable between all three traits explains 40-50% of the variation.
• Because the rise in LGBT identity is so heavily concentrated on the political left, its influence on the balance of power between the two parties is likely to be limited.
• College students majoring in the social sciences and humanities are about 10 points more LGBT than those in STEM. Meanwhile, 52% of students taking highly political majors such as race or gender studies identify as LGBT, compared to 25% among students overall.
• Various data sources indicate that gender nonconformity – trans and non-binary identity – reached its peak in the last few years and has started to decline.
• What kind of high school or college a young person attends poorly predicts their likelihood of identifying as LGBT. The one exception is Liberal Arts colleges, where 38% of students describe themselves in this way. This indicates that schooling might not have a large effect on changes in LGBT identity.
• Overall, the data suggest that while there has been an increase in same-sex behavior in recent years, sociopolitical factors likely explain most of the rise in LGBT identity.

Kaufmann's findings point to,

a vital distinction between LGBT identity and behavior. The youthful surge is mainly about LGBT identity, with considerably less change in sexual behavior (italics mine). The rise is greatest for bisexuality, especially among females, with less change for gays and lesbians.

The growth in LGBT identification shows no signs of slowing down among the young, but there is compelling evidence that gender nonconformity peaked around 2020 and declined in 2021. It appears less prevalent among teenagers than those in their early twenties.

Taken together with the rest of Kaufmann's paper these results seem to offer strong support for the conclusion that "alternative sexual identities are a form of social contagion, incubated online and by educational and medical institutions," rather than "a true expression of the range of human physiological diversity, which until now had been repressed by conservative social mores."

If that's indeed what's going on in our culture then the assertion that LGBTQ individuals are "born that way" becomes less tenable. It appears instead that - for many, at least - one's identification as LGBTQ is a product of social or cultural fashion rather than a consequence of genetic or psychological determinism.

Nature's Light Bulb

June is the mating season for one of the most remarkable creatures on earth. If you live in the eastern United States, Japan, Thailand, India or several other countries throughout the world, then you're in for a special treat over the next 4-6 weeks brought to you by one of nature's marvels - the firefly.

During the month of June fireflies put on a spectacular light show. Most of us have seen it, but we might not have a deep enough appreciation for what we're witnessing.

Each species of firefly has its own light code and all species generate their light without generating any heat. It's remarkably efficient.

Remarkable, too, is the anatomy of the firefly's abdomen which is structured to amplify the light.

Fireflies are actually not flies, they're beetles, and the John 10:10 project has put together a beautiful 8 minute film on this amazing insect.

Watch it, and hopefully if you get a chance to see the light display this month it'll be much more meaningful to you:

Summer Reading

Thinking of some books to read over the summer, maybe while lolling about on the beach? If you like crime novels, mystery, and intellectual stimulation all wrapped in one package why not consider In the Absence of God and/or its companion novel Bridging the Abyss?

Both of them offer an array of philosophical/theological ideas for you to ponder while you get drawn in by the drama that threads through both stories.

You can click on the buttons at the upper right of this page for more information on these books. I hope you'll give them a look and that, if you do, you'll share your thoughts about them with me.

Thanks, and best wishes for a great summer.

Hanson's Trumpology

Historian Victor Davis Hanson is always interesting and insightful. In this piece at The Daily Caller he offers a few perspicuous thoughts on Trump, Biden and 2024.

Here are some excerpts from his column:

The disaster that is the Biden administration has been a godsend for Trump. Had President Joe Biden simply plagiarized the successful Trump agenda, there would have followed no border disaster, no energy crisis, no hyperinflation and no disastrous flight from Afghanistan.

Had Biden followed through on his “unity” rhetoric, he could have lorded over Trump’s successful record as his own, while contrasting his Uncle-Joe ecumenicalism with Trump’s supposed polarization. Of course, serious people knew from the start that was utterly impossible. A cognitively challenged Biden was a captive of ideologues.

Thus, he was bound to pursue an extremist agenda that could only end as it now has — in disaster and record low polls.

Still, how ironic that the Biden catastrophe revived a Trump candidacy. Biden likely will cause the Democrats to lose Congress. His pick of a dismal Kamala Harris as vice president has likely ensured, for now, fewer viable Democratic presidential candidates in 2024.

So, will Trump run?

Contrary, perhaps, to much conventional opinion, a lot of conservatives hope he does not. A Trump candidacy could fracture the GOP and make it much more likely that Democrats retain the White House.

What many on the conservative side are hoping for is a "Trump without Trump" candidate. That is someone with Trump's policies, stamina and resolve in the face of often unfair attacks, but without the narcissism, boorishness and crassness that Mr. Trump too often exhibited.

There's reason to doubt that he would run again. His age, his business involvements, the attacks on his family, and, Hanson notes, "An otherwise nihilist progressive and media agenda would reawaken solely to destroy Trump — not his policies against which the Left has offered nothing of substance."

Whoever gets the Republican nomination, Hanson observes, "will run on secure borders, energy independence, deregulation, Jacksonian foreign policy, a populist, middle-class, nationalism and deterrence against China — albeit with much-needed new emphasis on destructive deficit spending."

Candidates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Sen. Tom Cotton are all close with or have worked for Trump and would, more or less, carry through the Trump agenda. The Trump record itself between 2017 and 2021 would be assessed more positively, especially in comparison to what preceded and followed it, and with Trump in retirement.

Trump...would likely not make the same mistake he made in 2017 when he appointed a series of "disloyal outliers or Republican Party apparatchiks" to positions in his administration. "Much less would he trust the ossified hierarchy of the FBI, CIA, DIA, CDC, NIH, or any of the other alphabetic, deep-state soups."

One point that Trump supporters would doubtless try to hammer home is "that a non-Trump Trump candidate would never endure, much less brawl against, left-wing madness. They would claim that avoiding cul-de-sac spats while doubling down on the Trump agenda sounds nice — in the fashion that, theoretically, there could be sunshine without the sun."

Perhaps, but, Hanson writes,

In the end, none of the above considerations will likely matter.

Instead, the outcome of the midterms will tell a lot. A clear but not overwhelming Republican win will likely discourage Trump and empower his critics.

But a historic blowout will spur Trump. In the end, even if most Republicans would prefer he not run, they will likely vote for him over the hard-left alternative.

This is surely correct. Given a choice between Trump and Biden (or Harris, or a Hillary clone), it's hard to doubt that many Republicans and a lot of independents wouldn't just hold their noses and vote for Trump.

Hanson adds some interesting predictions about the Democratic 2024 field:

As for the Democratic landscape, it will not be the case that Joe Biden may choose to run. He will not run because the decision will not be his.

Even if he manages to last another two years in office, Democratic grandees know his cognitive faculties are eroding rapidly. They read polls and know what his non compos mentis optics have done to their party.

These same interests are just as terrified of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Those two believe that the Biden disaster was not due to his embrace of hard socialism, but to his insufficient embrace of socialism.

Given the poverty of alternatives, all sorts of names will arise, from Mike Bloomberg-like billionaires and Michelle Obama to most of those dismal 2020 primary retreads.

If the Democrats get pummeled this November, I suspect they'll look for a governor whom they can pass off as a centrist, someone like Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania or Jared polis of Colorado, but Hanson is probably correct when he concludes that:

In the end, a Republican nominee can win who convincingly promises a secure border, a pathway to a balanced budget, energy independence, a crackdown on crime and a strong, nonpolitical military with a commitment to missile defense.

And the nominee would have to do all that neither with gratuitous insults nor playing by wishy-washy Marquess of Queensberry rules against those whose toxic agendas here and abroad have created the present disaster.

After the November mid-terms I anticipate that there'll be a lot of talk in GOP circles about a Ron DeSantis/Tim Scott ticket, but we'll see.