Is England Facing Civil War?

Writer Mark Steyn is predicting that there will be a civil war in England within the next fifteen years. His reason is that over the next decade Muslims will have gained decisive political clout and will begin imposing Sharia on the rest of the English who by that time will be fed up with the two-tier justice system that already prevails in England.

They will also be fed up with the criminalization of speech, especially speech critical of immigrants. You can read more of Steyn's thinking on this here.

Relatedly, Powerline's John Hinderaker notes a very disturbing trend in England. Whereas in recent years Muhammad has been the most popular name given to boys, Hinderaker cites a story from The Telegraph which tells us that another name is rising in the rankings:

Imagine if in 1945 hundreds of Brits christened their newborn sons Adolf. That might have rattled us as a nation, right?

I feel similarly about the news that, last year, 583 baby boys in the UK were given the name Yahya.

Yes, hundreds of families saw fit to bestow on their little ones the name shared by the one-time leader of Hamas and the architect of the worst mass murder of Jews since Adolf’s days – Yahya Sinwar.

The Top 100 Boys’ Names of 2024 were released this week, and Yahya has really blown up.

It reportedly enjoyed a larger spike in popularity than any other male name. It leapt a staggering 33 places up the rankings, to become the 93rd most popular boy’s name.

Hinderaker comments that,

No doubt some would argue that it is good, or at least acceptable, that large numbers of “British” babies are named Muhammad. But I don’t know how a positive spin can be put on the fact that a considerable number of Muslim parents are naming their male babies after the architect of the October 7 massacre.

How are actual Englishmen supposed to share their country with people whose values are literally as evil as Hitler’s, Stalin’s and Mao’s?

The Left has been telling us for decades that Muslim immigration into the West will have a meliorating affect on their religious fanaticisms, that they'll assimilate into the larger culture and adopt the values of the larger culture.

Well, in England, France, Germany, and The Netherlands Muslims are well on the way to becoming the larger culture and there seems to be scant indication that they have any desire to assimilate.

What Are They Afraid Of?

The Office of Personnel Managementsent out a memo the other day instructing federal workers that religious expression in the workplace will henceforth not be forbidden. The memo is reproduced here:

🚨Just in: The Trump administration has directed federal agencies to safeguard religious expression in the workplace, allowing employees to display crucifixes, carry Bibles, and pray with rosary beads pic.twitter.com/FZPwcpB7ya

— The Calvin Coolidge Project (@TheCalvinCooli1) July 28, 2025

As anodyne and sensible as this directive is, the folks at the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) considered it an intolerable breach of the "wall of separation" between church and state. Exactly how this memo violates that principle isn't clear but here's the memo they sent out:

An outrageous memo the United States Office of Personnel Management released yesterday says “during a break, an employee may engage another in polite discussion of why his faith is correct and why the nonadherent should rethink his religious beliefs.” https://t.co/8ExblnsKOe

— FFRF (@FFRF) July 29, 2025

What exactly are these people afraid of, that someone might have a meaningful conversation about what is perhaps the most important topic anybody could discuss? That someone might actually find themselves learning something important?

If two federal workers during their break got into a discussion on politics would that be considered "outrageous"? Since politics is an ersatz religion for some people, since some individuals are so zealous for their particular political beliefs that they're willing to estrange themselves from family and friends over their disagreements, why are the folks at the FFRF so allergic to the possibility that someone might bring up the topic of God in the workplace but not, presumably, to the possibility that someone might mention Biden or Trump?

Part of what it means to be an intellectually mature individual is being able to hear with equanimity opinions at variance with one's own. The person who cannot abide the knowledge that someone might disagree with them about something as important as religion is like a child who sticks his fingers in his ears while loudly insisting that he can't hear you.

Not only is the FFRF reaction childish, it also seems to be a symptom of insecurity. It's the sort of reaction one might expect from people who deep down fear that the views they've spent their lives believing and promoting simply cannot withstand scrutiny, and the only way to keep them from collapsing altogether is to avoid any discussion of their rationale.

Good for the Trump administration for treating federal workers like intellectually mature and psychologically healthy adults.

How Not to Find a Good Man

Nathanael Blake, writing at The Federalist, discusses a New York Times column titled "The Trouble With Wanting Men," by a writer named Jean Garnett. Blake writes that Garnett's piece,

portrays the sexual and relational landscape as a hellscape, or at least a dreary purgatory in which Garnett longs for men who are just not that into her. She is, as she eventually explained, on the dating scene because she recently divorced after her “open” marriage fell apart partially because she fell in love with a paramour who had no interest in a relationship.

One writer on X was quick to point out that Garnett had written a long, positive piece about said open marriage only a few years ago.

Now, Garnett is learning a painful lesson, as seen in her account of how she and her friends commiserate together, wondering, “Where were the men who could handle hard stuff? Like leaving the house for sex?” The answer should be obvious: Ladies, you’re competing with younger women — and endless internet porn — for the attention of guys who do not want a relationship.

Even if you were once irresistible to men, did you really think you would remain so forever?

It must be very difficult for women to understand that men are not like women. Men, quite often, are averse to commitment to one woman, and they're especially so if the women who desire a commitment are willing to give men what they do want without any serious conditions attached. Blake continues:

It is darkly humorous how these men have learned to use therapy-speak to dull the edge of the proverbial fury of a woman scorned. Garnett recounts one guy she hooked up with texting her the next week, “I was really looking forward to seeing you again … but I’m going through some intense anxiety today and need to lay low :(.” She reports that she replied, “Totally understand,” but tells her readers that she “didn’t. Feeble, fallible ‘looking forward’ is not longing; a man should want me urgently or not at all.”

Well, this guy clearly doesn’t want her — not really.

But Garnett doesn’t seem to get this, writing that, “lately I have been bruised by the ambivalence of men, how they can first want me and then become confused about what they want.” Again, they’re not confused. They’ve just learned that saying they are anxious and confused provides cover when they want to keep women of Garnett’s type at arm’s length.

It's just another way of saying, "It's not you, it's me" when in fact it's probably both of them.

It seems to be working. Though she wants to blame men for her miserable dating life, Garnett still writes that “the men my friends and I are feeling bleak about” are “the sweet, good ones. Dammit.” Of course, they aren’t sweet or good. They are selfish through and through. They’ve just learned that they can get away with that selfishness as long as they cover it with therapeutic language while telling women not to expect much from them.

And yet Garnett and her friends are somehow disappointed when the little they are promised is all they get.

Actually, "the sweet, good ones" are often the men most accomplished at play-acting. Their sweetness is a mask that hides both selfishness and arrested development, but they know that women like Garnett are easily fooled by the act.

In truth, the “good guys” aren’t the ones using anxiety as an excuse to ditch their middle-aged hook-ups. Indeed, the really good ones are, by Garnett’s age, mostly off the market. They aren’t hooking up with bitter writers. Rather, they are going to church and raising their children and are still married to their first wives. Those are the good ones. What Garnett is sifting through are the dregs — maybe superficially attractive dregs, but still the dregs — and dregs that have no intention of settling down with her.

This reality almost breaks through when Garnett reflects on the affair that ended her marriage:

“[T]hroughout the year and a half or so that we saw each other, he continued to gesture to his incapacity to commit as if it were a separate being, an unfortunate child who followed and relied upon him, maybe, or a physical constraint. I stood there reaching for him while he sad-faced back at me like a boxed mime: He couldn’t talk about it; he wished things were different; maybe someday the child would mature, the glass would break, but for now, there was really nothing to be done.

"It seems to me, surveying the field as a dating novice, that this kind of studiously irreproachable male helplessness abounds. I keep encountering and hearing about men who ‘can’t.’ Have these men not heard of ‘don’t want to?’"

Oh, they know about it. “Don’t want to” is indeed at the root of their refusal to commit to women such as Garnett. But anxiety and helplessness are palatable excuses, ones that women such as Garnett buy, or at least lease, because the alternative — realizing that she just isn’t that desirable and most of the good men are long gone anyway — is too painful.

If Garnett wants to find a good man, she should try joining a large, independent Christian church. She may find a good one through an online dating service, of course, but if she wants commitment and character in her man, especially at her age, she's going to have difficulty finding it amongst a secular demographic that hasn't ever made such virtues a priority in their lives. She's certainly going to have difficulty finding trust, respect, and faithfulness among acquaintances who've dabbled in open marriages which allow each spouse the freedom to "leave the house" to seek sex.

Blake concludes with this:

Garnett’s present unhappiness is a result of the ideology and behaviors she has promoted. The immediate cause of her unhappiness is that she’s a middle-aged woman hooking up with noncommittal men. The more comprehensive cause is the culture she has marinated in and furthered. She obviously yearns for the “old-fashioned man-woman stuff” she wants to dismiss. And she should — she was made for it.

But our culture encourages people to give their bodies quickly and their hearts slowly, if at all. This divides the person and precludes genuine love, which requires the gift of the whole self. This is why Christian sexual morality — and the marital sexual exclusivity it requires — is not a killjoy. Rather, it is a protector and promoter of human well-being. It directs us toward our good and the good of others.

The freedom, pleasure, and authentic flourishing the sexual revolution promised were lies and are why sexual liberation has hurt so many people. Sexual liberalism presumes that we thrive as autonomous pleasure seekers, unconstrained by norms or obligations. But this is false. We thrive through love, and real love, including romantic and sexual love, requires real commitment.

This, in turn, protects people by directing them toward their long-term fulfillment and happiness.

One hopes that Garnett and others like her find the happiness and fulfillment they're seeking, but until they realize why they're having trouble finding it the dating scene will, for many of them, largely remain a romantic hellscape.

The Democrats' Popularity Problems

Frankly, I don't believe the polls that say that the Democrats' approval rating is lower than the remains of the Titanic, but given their liabilities it probably should be. Jim Geraghty summarizes some of those liabilities at National Review.

He begins with a question: "What have Democratic leaders delivered to their constituents, at the national, state, and local levels in recent years?" To start with there's inflation:

Early in Biden’s term, former Harvard president and Clinton-era Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers warned the Democrats that excessive stimulus spending was creating inflationary conditions, but his party ignored him.

In July 2021, President Biden insisted, “There’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way — no serious economist.” When he said that, the inflation rate was 5.4 percent; it peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022 and remained above 3 percent until June 2024.

The Biden administration boasted of gargantuan, inflation-fueling spending bills, but by the end of Biden’s term, the results were thoroughly underwhelming — most famously, spending billions but only building 58 new charging stations. Even Democratic senators called the progress “pathetic.”

Biden himself complained to staffers in December 2023 that there were still no major construction sites for photo opportunities to tout the passage of a $1 trillion infrastructure bill he signed into law in November 2021.

The Democrats have also been on the wrong side of the immigration issue:

It took a while, but Democrats also gradually soured on how the Biden administration was handling illegal immigration; when Biden was elected, Democrats largely believed immigration was not a threat, the proportion who believed controlling and reducing illegal immigration to be an important goal was near its all-time low, and opposition to increased border patrols and opposed border wall construction was near its all-time high.

By the end of the Biden years, Democrats had started to sound more like the Republicans they had demonized as xenophobic.

Then there was the dishonesty surrounding President Biden's obvious mental incapacity:

If every elected official in the Democratic Party except for Dean Phillips was ready to play along with the idea that the doddering octogenarian was doing just fine and all the footage of him looking out of it were “cheap fakes,” why should Democratic voters trust them? Why should anyone trust them?

On the state and local level Democrats are facing a crisis due to what could be called Blue flight:

Looking beyond Washington . . . sure, lots of people still enjoy living in blue states like California, New York, and Illinois, as long as they can afford it. Even with a small increase in 2024, California’s population is lower than it was before the pandemic; at best, it’s now a slow-growth state. “Comparing census numbers from 2010 to 2024, California’s population has increased by less than 6 percent; in Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia and Utah, the increases range from 15 percent to nearly 30 percent.”

California is losing middle-class families and businesses and gaining illegal immigrants. As I’ve written before, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s popularity outside of his state appears to be based on a completely inaccurate sense of the quality of life in the Golden State:

U.S. News and World Report ranks each state on a wide variety of categories. In the most recent assessment, California ranked dead last in opportunity, dead last in affordability, 47th in employment, 47th in energy infrastructure, 46th in air and water quality, 45th in growth, 42nd in public safety, 42nd in short-term fiscal stability, and 37th in K–12 education.

The Tax Foundation ranks California 48th in its most recent State Tax Competitiveness Index. For five straight years, California has ranked highest in people moving out of the state, according to U-Haul’s data. BankRate found California was the 47th-best state for retirement. California ranks fifth-worst in roads and third-worst in drivers, second-highest in accident rate, and second-worst in drunk driving.

Can anyone point to California’s high-speed rail project — $15 billion spent so far over 16 years, with not a single stretch of track laid down — and conclude, “Yes, this is good government?”

Doesn’t it trouble Illinois Governor JB Pritzker that on his watch, Boeing, Caterpillar, and the hedge fund giant Citadel all chose to move their headquarters to other states, lamenting the state’s business environment and Chicago’s inability to get crime under control?

Doesn’t it bother Governor Tim Walz that the Minnesota state government keeps getting robbed blind, for billions of dollars’ worth of fraud, in every major state spending project?

Karen Bass apparently thought being mayor of Los Angeles was a form of semi-retirement. The county government is no better; we’re almost at the end of July, and Los Angeles County has issued 137 rebuilding permits for the 12,048 buildings damaged or destroyed by the wildfires.

In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson got what he wanted and now enjoys a job approval rating of 14 percent.

And New York City is on the cusp of electing a communist Islamist antisemite who wants to abolish prisons, defund police, have the city run the grocery stores, and "globalize the intifada," i.e. kill Jews wherever they're found.

There's more of Geraghty's column at the link, but it's little wonder that people, even many Democrats, are beginning to doubt that the Democrats have any idea how to run a city much less the country.

Why Public School Enrollments Are Dropping

Public school teacher Auguste Meyrat writing at The Federalist highlights a decline in public school enrollments.

[Since the cessatin of the pandemic] many parents have either continued homeschooling or gone on to enroll their children in private or charter schools, apparently fed up with their neighborhood public schools.

A recent report in Education Next from researchers Joshua Goodman and Abigail Francis offers some numbers that support what many of us teachers have observed firsthand. They mainly focus on enrollment in Massachusetts’ public schools, where the total enrollment in 2024 was “4.2 percent lower than it was in fall 2019,” and the numbers in future school years are only going to continue to worsen under these conditions.

Moreover, the drop was steeper among white and Asian students and mainly occurred in the middle school grades (five through eight).

It’s significant that this is happening in Massachusetts, a state with a well-funded school system that routinely leads the country year after year and has set the standard for public education ever since Horace Mann invented the whole concept nearly two centuries ago. If enrollment is declining here, then it’s fair to conclude that this is happening nationwide. Indeed, Goodman and Francis say as much: “Fall 2023 public school enrollment nationwide was 2.8 percent below predicted levels compared to a 2.6 percent drop for Massachusetts by fall 2024.”

So what accounts for the decline? Why is it more pronounced among whites and Asians? And why is it during middle school?

The standard answer for any public school problem is that there's not enough funding, but Meyrat isn't buying that:

It should go without saying that the leftist responses to this question, usually revolving around funding, equity, and accessibility, are utterly misguided. On the whole, public schools are amply endowed — particularly in Massachusetts, which spends more than $24,000 a student — and they are decked out with every instructional resource a teacher could ever want.

Most campuses aren’t the squalid, impoverished, gang-infested dens depicted in movies like Dangerous Minds or shows like Abbot Elementary. Rather, they are generally clean, boring, and look more like corporate offices.

The real reasons for declining enrollment ironically have more to do with the inverse of these complaints: Public schools are now excessively funded and overly obsessed with equity and accessibility, which then prevents them from being reformed. Regardless of the state, most public schools are now failing in three critical areas that parents care about when deciding on their children’s K-12 education: academic rigor, student discipline, and the campus’ moral influence.

This is pretty much right, although the failure to maintain student discipline is actually the root of a decline in academic rigor and concerns about the moral influence on campus. Nor did it start with the covid years. It's been an ongoing problem in public schools for decades. Meyrat continues:

To prevent mass failure, grading systems have been reconfigured in such a way as to discourage studying, practicing, and applying new concepts, and thereby deepening one’s understanding of any given subject.

Even in supposedly advanced classes, students are often awarded perfect grades for projects and games and rarely assessed objectively. When they actually encounter the occasional test or essay, many cheat and use AI. The students who rise above all this mediocrity and really do prove themselves to be formidable scholars are typically the students in affluent households who either have personal tutors or attend test-prep centers after school.

As for the on-level or non-advanced classes, there are hardly any demands. Simply showing up and completing a few busywork activities will allow a student to pass. For the rest of the time, the students in these classes are on their phones goofing off or allowed to roam the halls for hours at a time — something I’ve described elsewhere as “Vegetative Learning.”

The teacher’s job in these classes is to keep the peace, pass on the students, take attendance, and pray that their students already have some kind of rudimentary knowledge of reading and math so they can pass their standardized tests.

Predictably, due to this lack of rigor, there has been a surge in student misbehavior. As the saying goes, “the Devil finds work for idle hands,” and never have students been so idle in their classes as they are after Covid. Not only has this led many of them to become constantly restless and disruptive, but it has also led many to become addicted to their smartphones.

Again, all this is a consequence of the failure of school authorities to maintain a disciplined atmosphere. Students know that if they misbehave and get sent by their teacher to an assistant principal for discipline, that the principal is very likely to return the student to the classroom with a note to the teacher to solve the problem him or her self. With little recourse for handling disruptive students teachers often give up even trying and classrooms devolve into barely controlled chaos.

Assistant principals are in a tough spot because they know that if they discipline disruptive students they may not get support from the building principal when angry parents demand to confront him or her. And the lack of support extends, often, to the school board which doesn't want to deal with irate parents and threatened lawsuits.

This state of affairs derives from a view of school, promoted by inept administrators, as a "happy place" where students are to be coddled and pampered rather than as a "boot camp" where students are to be trained and taught basic life skills.

His concluding paragraphs nicely summarize the current circumstances in many of our public schools:

To make matters worse, the tools to deal with these students (remedial classes, suspension, expulsion, disciplinary campuses, or even juvenile detention centers) have been removed in the wake of the false DEI narratives that have prevailed in education ever since President Obama’s infamous memo to school districts to essentially stop disciplining black and brown kids.

Along with everything else, this misplaced equity agenda has resulted in certain students regularly wreaking havoc on school safety and student well-being with little recourse for teachers and principals to do anything about it.

Finally, the overall culture and spirit of public schools has become increasingly immoral. Many young people from otherwise wholesome households are introduced to a wide variety of obscenity, vice, and nihilism at the typical school.

Bullying and harassment go unchecked, kids routinely swear, everyone cheats on their work, most of the boys are addicted to online pornography, most of the girls consume mindless slop on social media, and most teachers are demoralized by idiotic policies that dictate how they’re supposed to teach.

All true. When minority kids aren't, or can't, be disciplined then it's hard to justify disciplining anybody, and when students can use the most vulgar obscenities in lashing out at teachers, then discipline has collapsed and teacher morale plummets.

This is why so many teachers, after ten or fifteen years of putting up with this, seek out some other, less stressful, line of work. It's why parents who care and can afford it are taking their kids out of public schools and either homeschool their children or find a private school alternative.

Too many public schools are just not "happy places" for either teachers or the students who want to learn.

Islam: Optimism and Pessimism

In the early years of this century, the journal First Things ran an essay on Islam by George Cardinal Pell in which the prelate considered the prospects for a peaceful future between Islam and the West.

Cardinal Pell gave the reader much to consider in the column, which would repay being read in its entirety. I've tried to encapsulate the main points in which he considers both an optimistic and a pessimistic prospect. First, the optimism:

Optimists also take heart from the cultural achievements of Islam in the Middle Ages and the accounts of toleration extended to Jewish and Christian subjects of Muslim rule as “people of the Book.”

Some deny or minimize the importance of Islam as a source of terrorism, or of the problems that more generally afflict Muslim countries, blaming factors such as tribalism and inter-ethnic enmity; the long-term legacy of colonialism and Western domination; the way that oil revenues distort economic development in the rich Muslim states and sustain oligarchic rule; the poverty and political oppression in Muslim countries in Africa; the situation of the Palestinians, and the alleged “problem” of the state of Israel; and the way that globalization has undermined or destroyed traditional life and imposed alien values on Muslims and others.

Indonesia and Turkey are pointed to as examples of successful Muslim societies, and the success of countries such as Australia and the United States as “melting pots,” creating stable and successful societies while absorbing people from different cultures and religions, is often invoked as a reason for trust and confidence in the growing Muslim populations in the West.

The phenomenal capacity of modernity to weaken gradually the attachment of individuals to family, religion, and traditional ways of life, and to commodify and assimilate developments that originate in hostility to it, is also relied on to “normalize” Muslims in Western countries.

Even so, there seems to me to be greater reason for pessimism, and I suspect that Pell agreed:

On the pessimistic side of the equation, concern begins with the Koran itself. I started, in a recent reading of the Koran, to note invocations to violence—and abandoned the exercise after fifty or sixty pages, as there are so many of them.

In coming to an appreciation of the true meaning of jihad, for example, it is important to bear in mind the difference between the suras (verses) written during Muhammad’s thirteen years in Mecca and those written after he had based himself at Medina. Irenic interpretations of the Koran typically draw heavily on the suras written in Mecca, when Muhammad was without military power and still hoped to win people through preaching and religious activity.

After emigrating to Medina, Muhammad formed an alliance with two Yemeni tribes and the spread of Islam through conquest and coercion began. One calculation is that Muhammad engaged in seventy-eight battles, only one of which, the Battle of the Ditch, was defensive. The suras from the Medina period reflect this decisive change.

The predominant grammatical form in which jihad is used in the Koran carries the sense of fighting or waging war. A different form of the verb in Arabic means “striving” or “struggling,” and English translations sometimes use this form as a way of euphemistically rendering the Koran’s incitements to war against unbelievers.

But in any case, the so-called “verses of the sword” (sura 9:5 and 9:36), coming as they do in what scholars generally believe to be one of the last suras revealed to Muhammad, are taken to abrogate a large number of earlier verses on the subject (over 140, according to one radical website).

The suggestion that jihad is primarily a matter of spiritual striving is also contemptuously rejected by some Islamic writers on the subject. One writer warns that “the temptation to reinterpret both text and history to suit ‘politically’ correct requirements is the first trap to be avoided,” before going on to complain that “there are some Muslims today, for instance, who will convert jihad into a holy bath rather than a holy war, as if it is nothing more than an injunction to cleanse yourself from within.”

Islam holds that the whole earth must be converted to Islam, by the sword if necessary. Those who refuse to convert are to be subjected to dhimmi status, essentially third-class citizenship, or killed. Pell poses a few crucial questions about this to his hypothetical Muslim dialogue partners:

Every great nation and religion has shadows and indeed crimes in their histories. This is certainly true of Catholicism and of all Christian denominations. And it is legitimate to ask our Islamic partners in dialogue whether they believe that the peaceful suras of the Koran are abrogated by the verses of the sword. Is the program of military expansion to be resumed when possible? Do they believe that democratic majorities of Muslims in Europe would impose shari’a law? Can we discuss Islamic history and even the hermeneutical problems around the origins of the Koran without threats of violence?

Obviously some of these questions about the future cannot be answered, but the issues should be discussed. Useful dialogue means that participants grapple with the truth and in this issue of Islam and the West the stakes are too high for fundamental misunderstandings.

Both Muslims and Christians are helped by accurately identifying what are core and enduring doctrines, by identifying what issues can be discussed together usefully, by identifying those who are genuine friends, seekers after truth and cooperation and separating them from those who only appear to be friends.

It's been over two decades since the Cardinal wrote this. Is there any more cause for optimism today than there was then? Given the ongoing slaughter of Christians by Muslims it's hard to feel optimistic.

Common Sense

A post from last March that bears repeating: Some things are just common sense. For example, it's common sense to believe that:

• men cannot make themselves into women, cannot menstruate, lactate, or get pregnant.
• women should not have to contend with men in their locker rooms or restrooms, or compete against men in athletic contests.
• we should not stock our public school libraries with salacious reading material or permit men who dress as women to flounce about in front of children or otherwise influence them.
• society should protect the lives of the innocent and helpless.
• criminals should be prosecuted and that failure to prosecute encourages more crime.
• if the only way to drive Russia out of Ukraine is to precipitate WWIII then we should strive now to seek the best deal for an end to the war that we can.
• our Bill of Rights is a blessing and a bulwark against tyranny.
• defending Hamas and anyone who supports them is to side with evil.
• our government should be as lean, efficient and as free of fraud and waste as possible.
• people who never went to college should not have to pay off the debt of people who did.
• judging people by their abilities and their character is fair and just and that judging them by their skin color is not.
• a nation should have secure borders and properly vet all who seek to get in.
• if there are rapists, murderers, and other felons in our country illegally they should be deported.
• children born to people who are breaking our laws by being here or who are otherwise here only to have children should not be rewarded with citizenship.
• if nuclear power plants can operate safely and the spent fuel be stored safely we should build more nuclear power plants.
• if the government continues to print more money inflation will ensue and more people will ultimately be unemployed.
• we cannot increase our national debt indefinitely.
• if a state raises the minimum wage the prices of goods will go up and the people who work minimum wage jobs will soon be unemployed as over 10,000 fast food workers in California have discovered.

As you reflect on this list ask yourself which of our two major political parties is most likely to be found on the side of common sense and which is most likely to be found on the other side.

Testing One's Worldview

One of the tests of any worldview is whether one can live within it consistently. On this test the worldview called naturalism - i.e. the view that the natural world is all there is, no supernatural entities exist - falls short since many, if not most, naturalists find that they have to abandon some beliefs and assumptions that are very difficult to give up.

For example, among the things for which there is no room in a logically consistent naturalism are the following:

1. ultimate meaning in life
2. free will
3. objective moral right and wrong
4. the intrinsic value of human beings
5. objective human rights
6. mind/consciousness
7. an adequate ground for beauty, love, and truth

On the other hand, not only do each of these fit comfortably in a classical Christian worldview, it could be argued that they're actually entailed by that view.

The logic of naturalism, though, compels one to regard them all as illusions, but few naturalists can live consistently with that. They find themselves constantly acting as if their lives have meaning, as if there really are objective moral rights and wrongs, as if there are objective human rights, as if they have free will.

They can only deny the reality of these things at the theoretical level, but they affirm their reality over and over again in the way they live their everyday lives. They find themselves forced, in a sense, to become poachers, helping themselves to meaning, morality, human rights, free will and the rest from the storehouse of 2000 years of Christian heritage because their own worldview cannot provide them.

But when one has to poach from competing visions of reality in order to make life bearable one is tacitly sacrificing any claim to be holding a rational, coherent philosophy of life. Indeed, to be consistent a naturalist should be a nihilist and accept the emptiness, sterility, and despair nihilism entails, yet even though some naturalists recognize these bitter fruits are the logical consequences of their view of things, few can bring themselves to accept them.

They embrace the naturalism while simply suppressing or ignoring the logical implications as if they don't matter.

For those who do accept the consequences of their naturalism, the loss of the aforementioned crucial existential human needs is more than compensated for, in their minds, by the liberation from God that lies at the heart of naturalism. It's all worth it, they implicitly calculate, if the upside is being freed from any obligation to a supreme being.

Naturalists are at liberty to embrace this schizoid view of life, of course, but they're not free to live as if they can hold on to those existential needs while denying the only adequate ground for them and then declare that their worldview is more rational than the Judeo-Christian alternative.

Many Colleges Are Closing Their Doors

There's an evolution taking place in higher education that is in one way very unfortunate. It seems that enrollments at many colleges are declining, which suggests that a lot of young people have decided they don't want to get up to their chins in debt by taking out loans to go to school.

This is probably in the main a good thing. Most high school graduates don't need, and aren't suited for, college. On the other hand, the reduced enrollments mean that many colleges are closing, which also would not be a bad thing were the closures primarily affecting schools committed to DEI indoctrination rather than education.

Sadly, many of the schools that have closed their doors are small non-profit liberal arts colleges which are more likely to have maintained high academic standards.

An article by Laura Hollis at elaborates:

Siena Heights University, a small Catholic college in Adrian, Michigan, just announced that it will be closing at the end of the next academic year, after 105 years. Siena Heights -- whose enrollment has dropped 20% since 2008 -- follows other Michigan schools: Marygrove College closed in 2019, Finlandia University closed in 2023, and Concordia University Ann Arbor has shuttered all its undergraduate programs.

These are not isolated instances; they are part of a national trend.

Earlier this week, BestColleges.com published a list of colleges and universities that have closed since 2008. In that period, 194 private for-profit schools have closed. It used to be that for-profit institutions -- often viewed as fly-by-night organizations with poor academic standards -- were at greatest risk of closure. Not anymore. The traditional two-and four-year nonprofit colleges and universities are now facing perilous futures as well; 126 have closed since 2008.

A huge part of the problem is skyrocketing costs. In 1980, the average cost of one year at college -- tuition plus room and board -- was $9,438. In 2014, it was $23,872. In 2024-25, it was $38,270. Just since 2000, annual tuition and fees alone (without housing) at private colleges and universities have gone from $15,800 to almost $40,000.

Even if we look only at public universities, we still see staggering increases. Annual tuition at public universities went from $738 in 1980 to $9,349 in 2014. By 2024, the average public university tuition was $27,146.

Part of the reason for this is the proliferation of administrators in many universities. Many schools of all sizes have hired far more administrative staff than what's needed to provide their students with a good education.

They've also expanded their recreational programs to attract students, but to run a sport like, say, soccer which brings in little or no revenue, the school must provide facilities, equipment, insurance, busses for transportation, and staffing. Many schools have numerous such programs for both men and women and these programs need to be funded.

Hollis continues:

And as bad as those numbers are, they don’t reflect the true costs. Most students today must borrow to fund at least part of their education. Average federal student loan debt (not including other private loans) is now around $37,000 per individual borrower. A graduate who leaves college with, say, $50,000 in student loan debt and takes the full 20 years to repay the loan at a 7% interest rate will pay back $93,000 -- or nearly twice what she borrowed.

In aggregate, student loan debt in the United States exceeds $128 billion. That is $128 billion that won’t contribute to economic growth in the purchase of homes, cars or other consumer goods, won’t be spent on children, won’t be invested in new businesses.

Part of the tragedy of this is that many students graduate with enormous debt and a degree that will be completely unhelpful in paying the debt off. These unfortunate young people will have a great deal of difficulty buying a home, their marriage prospects will be diminished, and they'll be burdened for most of their adulthood by a debt that stifles them in their every attempt to flourish.

There's more on this at the link, but Hollis closes with this prediction:

It’s ... reasonable to assume that there will be demand for institutions of higher education that focus on students’ needs rather than the esoteric interests of faculty pressed to publish for publication's sake; that have practical residence options without expensive and unnecessary frills like granite countertops, flatscreen TVs, and indoor climbing walls; that focus on professional preparation and skills development; that encourage self-esteem based upon achievement rather than skin color, ethnicity, socioeconomic status or membership in a class of self-appointed elites.

Unfortunately, it's in large part the no-frills schools that are closing down first.

Muslim Intolerance, Leftist Jew-Hatred

Recently, an army of Syrian terrorists attacked Druze communities along the Syrian border with Israel. The Druze are peaceful people, but the Syrians, many of whom were ISIS and al Qaeda holdovers, perpetrated mass slaughter on these people nonetheless until the Israelis bombed the Syrians to smithereens.

Alan Joseph Bauer at Townhall.com asks the question, "Why would the ISIS and al-Qaeda guys in army fatigues go after the Druze, who seem like such nice people?" His answer is that Muslims tolerate nobody.

He goes on to explain,

In Europe, emboldened Muslims will tell locals not to walk their dogs in their neighborhoods. They will tell women to cover themselves, even if these women are Christians and have no relationship whatsoever with them. They will prevent alcohol from being moved through their areas.

Islam as a religion and political movement does not favor compromise with or respect for other religions and peoples. Whereas the UAE shows incredible tolerance for other faiths, those [countries] associated with Iran, Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood express a chauvinism that is not Kumbaya.

They want to take it all, they respect no alternative religion or way of life. One can find many videos online of alien Muslims harassing European women on the street, on buses, and on trains. There is no respect there. There is no consideration or thought that the host culture, while different, is worthy of respect.

Just opening X now revealed Muslim youths attacking German boys at a mall in Germany for no particular reason. So on that matter, they are equal opportunity haters: they hate the Jews, Christians, Druze, other Muslims who don’t think like them (Sunni vs. Shia), etc. In the mind of the Syrian terrorists ... the Druze need to be dealt with like the Alawites a few months ago.

Some people might object that their Muslim friends don't fit Bauer's description, and that may be true, but in America Muslims are still largely in the minority. Their intolerance will grow as their numbers increase. Those who hold to a more moderate form of Islam, or are secular, will find themselves eclipsed by the fundamentalists who see it as a religious duty to convert the infidel or, failing that, to kill him.

The more radical and ideological a group is the more likely it is that they will ascend to power and influence. Bauer goes on to show how the larger society, at least on the left, is cowed by the radical Muslim minority and how their cowardice has engendered in them a species of Jew-hatred:

So we live in a very confusing age. There are times when one has to listen to women as per Me Too; there are other times when women are completely ignored or blamed for the horrors they experienced. There are good genocides that you don’t discuss and bad genocides that you have to protest for endless months on the university green.

How can a poor person figure out when to be on which side? Here is a simple cheat sheet: if the event makes the Jews look good, just look the other way. If it makes the Jews look bad, pile on.

Israeli women violated and murdered [on 10/7]. Nothing. Palestinians being bombed in a war to get rid of Hamas: Genocide! Israel saves Druze in Syria from ISIS and al-Qaeda ...: not a word about genocide as Israel would look good. The left either went quiet on Iran or came out on the side of the mullahs.

Jew hatred is the guiding principle of the left. The fact that Israel saved a religious minority from a murderous government gets the Jews no credit points. Israel made a smart move to strengthen an important minority group and help stabilize its northern border.

Israel is thinking about its future and not the headlines in a hateful Western press.

If anyone should think Bauer overstates the case he or she might listen carefully to the words of the Muslim Zohran Mamdani who will probably be the next mayor of New York City and who refuses to condemn calls to "globalize the intifada," which, given the history of previous intifadas, means killing Jews everywhere one finds them.

The Battle of Belgrade

There is, unfortunately, an abysmal ignorance in the Western world of both the theology and the history of Islam, an ignorance which the historian Raymond Ibrahim has been working hard to correct. In his two fascinating books, Sword and Scimitar and Defenders of the West, Ibrahim, whose family is Egyptian and Coptic Christian, recounts much of the history of the long war between Islam and Europe, a war that it often seems only Muslims are fighting.

Yesterday marked the anniversary of one of the crucial battles in that war, the Battle of Belgrade (1456), and Ibrahim narrates an animation that depicts those events. In it, we're introduced to one of the greatest heroes of Western civilization, a man named John Hunyadi, a man of whom few Americans have ever heard, although he's a national hero in Hungary.

As the Muslim multitudes swept toward the Hungarian city of Belgrade Hunyadi took it upon himself to lead a small group of professional soldiers and a ragtag assemblage of peasants against the armies of the Turks. In Hunyadi's words, "We have had enough of our men enslaved, our women raped, wagons loaded with severed heads of our people, the sale of chained captives, the mockery of our religion... We shall not stop until we succeed in expelling the enemy from Europe."

The battle Ibrahim describes is only part of Hunyadi's story, a story that includes terrible betrayal and astonishing courage. I encourage you to watch the video, and if you're a reader of history, get your hands on either or both of Ibrahim's books. You'll be very glad you did, but if books are not your preference (although they should be), Ibrahim has a regular column at PJMedia.

The video is about twelve minutes long:

Three Thoughts

1. It's probably a consequence of the deplorable state of history education in so many of our public schools that young people think Zohran Mamdani has "new ideas."

2. Pope Leo lamented the tragic accidental bombing by the Israelis of the only remaining Catholic church in Gaza. Maybe he'll next lament the fact that there's only one Catholic church left in Gaza in the first place. It'd be instructive if the pope would publicly elaborate on why that is.

3. The Trump administration is regularly accused of being a "threat to our democracy." Ironically, the accusation is made by the same people who voted for an administration, the Biden regime, which tried to establish the abortive Disinformation Governance Board, a bureaucracy that would've policed speech that dissented from the leftist establishment’s perspective; whose apparatchiks sicced the FBI on angry parents protesting at school board meetings; who worked with Twitter (X) and other social media giants to silence and deplatform people with opposing views; and who sent spies into Catholic churches to keep tabs on pro-lifers.

Now we hear on the news that Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, has conclusive evidence that the Obama administration, including Obama himself, along with his intelligence agencies, deliberately and falsely produced documents in 2016 to slander the newly-elected Donald Trump and to undermine his presidency.

If that's all true, nothing Donald Trump has done in either of his terms as president comes anywhere close to being the threat to our democracy as what the Obama and Biden people did.

Iran Intends to Assassinate Trump

Friday’s Wall Street Journal published a column titled Iran Is Out to Assassinate Trump (paywall), by Behnam Ben Taleblu and Saeed Ghasseminejad. Here's the gravamen of the piece:

Threats against Mr. Trump began in his first term and ramped up after he authorized the 2020 drone strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, architect of Iran’s regional terror strategy. In response, Iranian officials authorized an arrest warrant, placed a bounty on Mr. Trump’s head, and threatened to take deadly revenge against the president and his national security team.

Contrary to recent denials by Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, these threats and plots are real. Books about the president’s time in office and on the campaign trail detail the precautions Mr. Trump had to take. U.S. authorities have been tracking, uncovering, and, where possible, prosecuting people involved. The feds have disrupted several Iranian plots to assassinate Mr. Trump on U.S. soil.

The threats proliferated following the 12-day war between Iran and Israel.

Leading Shiite clerics tied to the regime branded Mr. Trump with labels such as mohareb (one who wars against God), mahdur al-damm (one whose blood must be spilled), mufsid fil-arz (corruptor of the earth), and kafir harbi (warring infidel). Under Islamic law each of these terms invites violence against the offender.

After Mr. Trump mocked Mr. Khamenei on Truth Social on June 27 and bragged about sparing his life, Grand Ayatollahs Nasser Makarem Shirazi and Hossein Noori Hamedani issued a fatwa condemning Mr. Trump as a mohareb who merits execution.

Their fatwa echoes the chilling decree by Mr. Khomeini against British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie in the late 1980s. Mr. Rushdie has had to live under protection for decades and nearly lost his life in a 2022 stabbing attack.

Clerics who train the next generation of Islamic Republic theologians at the Tehran Seminary released a statement labeling Mr. Trump a mahdur al-damm, indicating that his life is forfeit and his blood can be shed without legal consequence.

Ayatollah Mohsen Araki, a member of the regime’s Orwellian-sounding Assembly of Experts and Expediency Discernment Council, broadened the scope of these fatwas. Mr. Trump’s “property and life,” he said, “are permissible targets, and the lives of those dependent on the American government are also permissible targets.”

It's a very sad fact about our contemporary left that in a poll released last April 55% of those who identify as left of center said that killing President Trump would be justified, so a successful assassination attempt against him by the Iranians would doubtless result in much jubilation in Democrat precincts.

It's sick and deranged but that's unfortunately where a lot of the American electorate is in our current moment.

Perhaps, though, Mr. Trump might himself be considering declaring a fatwa, a fatwa against those horrid Iranian clerics. If so, I'm sure the Israelis would be happy to carry it out.

A Fifth Challenge

Yesterday I posted Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor's four challenges to skeptics of Near-Death Experiences. Today I want to post his fifth challenge. It involves the remarkable story of a woman named Pam Reynolds.

Here's Egnor's description of Pam Reynolds' experience (slightly edited for clarity):

Pam Reynolds was a woman who had an aneurysm at the base of her brain and needed a special kind of neurosurgery.

It was done in 1991 in Phoenix. What they had to do was stop her heart. They had to drain the blood out of her brain. They cooled her body temperature down to about 60° F, and they had to repair the aneurysm.

They had to open the artery at the base of her brain with no blood flowing. They monitored her brain to prove that she had no brain waves. She had no brain stem activity. And she had a near-death experience when she was proven to be basically clinically dead during the operation.

She popped out of her body, went up to the ceiling. She watched the operation. She was able to describe the surgeon's instruments rather precisely afterwards. She described the conversations the surgeons had. She described who entered and left the room. She described the music that was playing.

She went down a tunnel. She saw her dead relatives. It was a beautiful place, a beautiful scene. She realized she had to return to raise her three children. She came back down the tunnel. Went back into her body. And when she went back into her body, she said it felt like diving into ice water because her body temperature was 60 degrees.

A slightly more detailed account of Ms Reynolds' experience can be found here. Egnor continues, "[This] is a very well-documented near-death experience, and there have been hundreds of people in the medical literature who have had experiences similar to that."

So, people who deny the reality of near-death experiences have to explain how Pam Reynolds saw the things she saw when all the blood was drained out of her brain and her body chilled to 60° F during surgery.

P.S. In yesterday's post I noted that skeptic Michael Shermer claimed that there've been no instances of NDErs seeing numbers or symbols that would've been out of view of everyone in the room. I mentioned that that claim is not correct, but neglected to give any examples. I've since corrected the oversight on that post.

Four Challenges for the NDE Skeptic

From time to time I've talked about the evidential value of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) or more precisely Post-Death Experiences for the existence of an immaterial, immortal soul. In their book The Immortal Mind neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and writer Denyse O'Leary devote a chapter to addressing various efforts by skeptics to debunk near-death experiences.

One suggestion skeptics offer is that they originate in hypoxia (shortage of oxygen) or hypercarbia (excess carbon dioxide) in the brain. Egnor, who has treated these conditions, points out that these conditions produce distress, not the calm of a near-death experience.

Egnor recently appeared on Piers Morgan's podcast with prominent skeptic Michael Shermer and offered four challenges to anyone who doubts that NDEs are veridical, (i.e. they can be shown to be true). His appearance on the podcast is recounted in an article at Evolution News, and the whole episode is very interesting. It can be viewed here. In it Egnor presents the following four claims about NDEs beginning at about the 12:18 mark:

1. NDEs are very clear. They’re very organized. They often involve a life review, which is not the kind of thing you see from a brain that is hallucinating or a brain that is dying, a brain that lacks oxygen.

2. NDE experiencers often see things that can be confirmed. About 20% of people with near-death experiences have out-of body experiences where they leave their body and see things that are happening in the room during the time that they have no heartbeat, during the time that they are deeply unconscious and comatose because their brain isn’t working.

In the podcast Michael Shermer states that one test of NDEs that he could accept as dispositive would be if the near-death experiencer reported seeing numbers on machinery that could only be seen from a vantage point near the ceiling of the room. Shermer claimed that such experiences have never been reported, but in fact they have.

In one case related by Gary Habermas in the book Minding the Brain (p.335), a patient in cardiac arrest and experiencing an Out-of-the-Body event noticed a twelve digit number on the top of a piece of medical machinery. Having Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, the patient memorized the number and when she regained consciousness, related it to the nurses who wrote it down. When the machine was no longer needed a custodian brought in a ladder, the number was read, and it was exactly as the patient had said.

Habermas writes that there are numerous such accounts, and gives other examples.

3. Meeting only persons who have died. Egnor says that a third thing that fascinates him and isn’t often mentioned is that he's unaware of any reports in the medical literature of a person who goes down the "tunnel" and meets dead relatives but who actually also met a living person. That is, all near-death experiences where one encounters people "on the other side" are [with] people who are dead, even if the experiencer didn’t know they were dead.

There have been some fascinating cases of people in car accidents where somebody in the car died. Another passenger has a near-death experience and the experiencer sees the dead person on the other side but doesn't see other passengers in the car who, unbeknownst to the experiencer, survived the accident.

Egnor goes on to remark that, "Of course, at some point, a credible instance of seeing a living person may emerge from the literature. But even so, if the vast majority of experiences involve seeing people who have died, we should ask, how likely is it that a mere hallucination would work so selectively that way?"

4. The fourth challenge Egnor poses to the skeptic is to account for why near-death experiences are often transformative. People are profoundly affected by their experience. From the Evolution News summary:

In The Immortal Mind, Egnor quotes Tulane University psychologist Marilyn A. Mendoza, a specialist in grief counseling, who succinctly expresses what many counselors have noted: “Perhaps the most common after-effect of an NDE is the loss of the fear of death and a strengthened belief in the afterlife. There is typically a new awareness of meaning and purpose in experiencers’ lives. A new sense of self with increased self-esteem is reported.”

That effect shows up in research studies too. Leeds Beckett University psychologist Steve Taylor, author of Spiritual Science (2018), offers a striking fact about the depth of the transformation:

“It’s remarkable that one single experience can have such a profound, long-lasting, transformational effect. This is illustrated by research showing that people who have near-death experiences following suicide attempts very rarely attempt suicide again. This is in stark contrast to the normal pattern — in fact, a previous suicide attempt is usually the strongest predictor of actual suicide.”

That is indeed a significant finding. Some might argue that people who recall NDEs are overstating their newfound commitment to a different way of seeing life. But when suicidal people stop attempting suicide, they have clearly undergone a concrete and highly significant behavior change. Generally, the best predictor of any future behavior is past behavior.

In addition to these four challenges Egnor mentions one other fascinating story that I'll explain in tomorrow's post.

Tired Yet of Winning?

Candidate Trump promised his voters that they'd win so much in a Trump presidency that they'd get tired of winning. We'll see if exhaustion eventually sinks in, but it hasn't so far for most Americans.

National Review's Jim Geraghty sums up yesterday's column on some of Trump's recent successes with this:

To sum up, the Iranian nuclear program is now smoldering rubble;

Europe’s ready to enact tough sanctions on Tehran again; the Russian economy is creaking with strain; NATO’s stronger than ever; the Chinese are holding their export-focused economy together with duct tape;

Unemployment’s low; inflation’s still mostly okay for now, the stock market is roaring;

The tax cuts have been preserved;

PEPFAR (The anti-AIDS African program) is preserved;

Planned Parenthood is so financially squeezed the organization might go under;

The wealthy, snooty, and overwhelmingly left-wing universities finally get to pay those higher taxes they’ve been calling for all these years.

Altogether it's such a refreshing change after four years of lassitude, drift, and corruption. President Trump and his administration are engineering this renaissance, but the American people, and indeed the people of the world, are the beneficiaries.

Go here and here for more examples of winning.

Worst of the Worst

Bill Glahn has done some research on who, exactly, is being deported from his state of Minnesota, and discusses his results at Powerlineblog.

He first takes the media to task for deceptive and tendentious reporting on the issue:

As far as I can tell from my deep dive into the illegal immigration issue, the Feds really are concentrating their efforts on the worst cases. Yet, the typical media headline, this one from NPR, reads, "Sharpest growth in ICE detention population: people with no criminal convictions."

Obviously, this definition excludes any convictions having to do with the illegal immigration itself. By “no” they refer to convictions only in the United States. And by using “convictions” they exclude a huge population of aliens charged with other serious crimes but deported before the local judicial system has run its course.

Well, those are fine points about the detainee population that NPR seems to want you not to think very hard about. Glahn then focuses on cases in Minnesota in which deportees return illegally to the U.S.

If you return to the U.S. after being previously deported, that is ... a felony under U.S. law. For the past few weeks, I’ve been tracking such cases in the U.S. District Court of Minnesota.

I’ve been tracking 60 of the cases filed in the District since Pres. Trump began his second term. Which is admittedly a drop in the bucket considering there are easily more than 100,000 illegal aliens in Minnesota.

The last rigorous study of the phenomenon (using 2019 data) counted only 81,000. Of those, the plurality are from Mexico. Add in illegals from El Salvador and Guatemala, and you have the majority.

My sample of five dozen match these demographics. The majority of the men (and they are all men) are from Mexico. All but one of the remainder are from elsewhere in Latin America. Of these 60 cases filed since January, at least 25 defendants have already been deported.

Glahn offers another significant caveat to NPR's claim:

Keep in mind that the goal of the U.S. Attorney, or ICE officer, or FBI agent at each step is to provide just enough background to achieve the immediate goal: obtain a search warrant, an indictment, a detention order, a conviction, etc. They don’t serve as biographers to each defendant passing through the system.

The indictments for illegal entry typically run no more than a couple of sentences each with the goal of establishing just two facts: 1. the defendant was previously deported and 2. now he’s back. Anything else is extraneous material.

That said, the U.S. Attorney, in some cases, has bothered to document additional deportations for individual defendants, totaling 51 prior deportations across the 60 defendants. One defendant alone recorded eight (8) of the 51 earlier deportations.

It’s only when the process gets beyond the indictment stage does the backstory (or even nationality) emerge for an individual defendant. In general, the deeper the process goes, the more horrors emerge.

As an example consider that,

[T]he Minnesota Dad (allegedly) sexually assaulted his 12-year-old daughter. But he was not “convicted,” as NPR would require before pursuing his re- re-deportation. Other Minnesota Men have backgrounds in drug dealing, burglary, theft, assault and other sex crimes. DWI’s and car crashes pop up with great frequency.

Okay, so ICE is getting rid of a lot of very bad people, but what of all the innocents that have been putatively caught up in the ICE dragnet? In Minnesota, at least, there don't seem to be too many:

What I have not run across is anyone employed in either the agricultural or hospitality industries. There was one restaurant cook, but he was also a convicted felony cocaine dealer.

When defendants are indicted on felony re-entry charges, they are given a Hobson’s choice: they can agree to be handed over to ICE and deported, or they can stay in the custody of the U.S. Marshals and receive weeks or months of due process (assisted by a taxpayer-paid lawyer) and then be handed over to ICE for deportation.

In a few instances, the court has released a defendant on bond, while awaiting his Federal trial, but then he is picked up ICE and deported. I’ve dug and dug and dug but have not yet encountered one of those seemingly ubiquitous cases of the military veteran/U.S. citizen/permanent resident/innocent bystander who got swept up in an ICE dragnet and kidnapped off the street by masked gunmen.

Of course, Glahn's samnple size is relatively small and there may be troubling cases that would show up in a larger sample, but if innocents were being routinely detained and deported it seems likely that there'd be at least one such instance of it in his data. He closes with this:

The backstories of these gentlemen always involve some other criminal event(s) that got them onto the radar of ICE/FBI/U.S. Attorney. Always, with no exceptions.

Does anyone know of any well-documented instances in which this wasn't the case? How many instances are there in which someone was deported who posed no threat to anyone, who committed no crime other than crossing the border illegally, who has been in the country for several years and has lived a quiet, productive life while here? I'd sincerely be interested in knowing how common such cases are. If any readers know of any you can email me by clicking on the "contact us" button above. Please include links to the story.

Hurting Those Who Love Them

We all have friends and/or family, or know someone who does (or maybe it's ourselves), who believe that it's wrong for the administration to deport those who are in the country illegally but who've not committed any crime while being here.

With certain qualifiers, I'm partly sympathetic to this view, but what I have no sympathy for are those who, because of deep disagreement over this issue, have divorced themselves from family and friends and who will henceforth have nothing to do with the people they formerly claimed to have loved.

One person wrote on social media that separating himself from his family over this issue was a matter of human decency. This is very sad, especially since it suggests that these folks' self-righteousness outweighs their love for those from whom they've estranged themselves and whom they've often deeply hurt in the process.

Imagine a fellow named John who lives in a nice house with a wife and several children. John makes a comfortable living and is politically active on behalf of liberal causes.

John is always careful to lock his doors when he leaves the house or his car because he doesn't want to have his possessions stolen, but one day he forgets to do so. Coming home early before his wife was home from work and his kids were out of school he's shocked to find a rather bedraggled-looking family of complete strangers sitting in his living room.

When he asks them what they're doing in his house, they tell him that the front door was open and they needed a place to stay, so they came in. They also tell John that they left their old neighborhood because it wasn't very nice, there were drugs and gangs, his place was much nicer, he had a well-stocked refrigerator, and they wanted to stay there.

They promise him they'd mow his grass and clean the house, and that since he had an extra bedroom, they assumed it'd be alright with John, since he had old Biden/Harris stickers on his door, if they made themselves at home.

John tells them that he sympathized with their plight, but that they couldn't stay; they'd have to leave; he'd even give them a meal and some cash to help them on their way. Nevertheless, they were insistent about moving in.

Finally, John takes out his phone and calls the police, who come and escort the family back to their old neighborhood.

Was John wrong to refuse to allow these poor people to remain in his house? Did his practice of locking his doors and his refusal to allow the intruders to stay make him a moral reprobate? Does he lack human decency? Doesn't he have the right to decide whom he'll invite into his home and whom he will exclude?

How many of those who've estranged themselves from friends and family because their former loved ones react the same as John did would themselves fault John? How many of them leave the doors to their houses and cars unlocked? How many of them would decline to evict people who tried to move into their houses uninvited?

Yet locking one's doors is analogous to building a wall on our border of our national "house," and calling the police to evict the intruders who were in his house illegally is analogous to deporting immigrants who are in our national home illegally. Our nation is our home writ large.

If you think I'm wrong about this, tell me what the significant difference is between John's situation and that which we find ourselves in after four years of a reckless border policy.

Abandoning Dawkins, Embracing Christ

An article at PJ Media by Mark Tapscott summarizes a 16-minute video in which a millennial named Josh Timonen recounts how he returned to the Christianity of his childhood.

Timonen's testimony was especially interesting to me because beginning in 2006 he had been a collaborator with evolutionary biologist and committed atheist Richard Dawkins on some of Dawkins' projects.

Tapscott writes:

Timonen initially created Dawkins' website, then steadily became an indispensable resource for the then-high riding English evolutionary biologist and author of "The God Delusion," who was in high demand for speaking engagements, particularly on college campuses and at influential conferences across the U.S. and Europe.

Timonen was riding high, but "during this time, there were definitely glimpses of emptiness in all of this, glimpses of people who were definitely not satisfied with their life." An experience at an atheist conference where Dawkins and fellow atheist advocate Sam Harris were speaking began opening Timonen's eyes.

Harris happened to mention something remotely positive about spirituality and the crowd rebelled, making it clear they didn't want to hear anything remotely good about anything in the way of spirituality, or suggestion that there might be an afterlife.

That intolerance made a deep impression on Timonen. "He was saying the most lukewarm thing about spirituality, but everybody just shut him down. It bothered me that no one was open to that and that there was such an attachment to a physicalist, materialist worldview.

"The materialist world-view means I'm only going to accept things that are within the natural world and I'm going to exclude anything spiritual or that I cannot explain with natural law. I think the atheist world-view has a lot to do with control. It's about controlling the walls of your sandbox, to say that 'if I keep everything within these walls of sand, then I am safe. I can understand it, I can explain it and that's it."

Not long after, Timonen's wife gave birth to their first child, a daughter, who came prematurely, and was not given much chance of living. Timonen recalled thinking that this child was the most important thing in his life, and yet, as an atheist, he had to believe his daughter was just another human who, like him, would simply live and then die a meaningless death.

"The atheist world-view can easily discount the value of a single human, and I remember wrestling with that and thinking 'but this is everything,' and it just felt wrong. It was a moment of realizing that the world-view was not connecting" with reality, he explained.

Then in 2020, Josh and his wife and daughter moved to Portland, Ore., where they witnessed the riots that exploded there and elsewhere in the wake of the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd. Neighborhoods Timonen had come to know and love were left in flames.

A few of the rioters were being arrested, but then they would be released without consequences the next day. Timonen was amazed when some of his young friends and business associates defended the rioters, claiming it was a "good cause." But what is a "good cause" in an atheistic worldview, he wondered, if there is nothing after death?

"Those kids rioting had no moral compass. That got me thinking a lot about that moral compass, where is it coming from. I thought I aligned with these people who were defending the riots, but I didn't, I thought, wait a minute, I thought we were the good guys. And I remember clearly thinking 'why are you defending what is clearly violence and destruction and desecrating our city"?

Timonen explains that he was also shocked during the COVID pandemic by how big institutions such as the government, the drugmakers and the medical profession, as well as individual Americans, sought to control people, to "police each other" with social distancing and mask-wearing mandates.

"That really shocked me and it felt like there was a wave of evil that had come over everyone. I think of it like an ocean wave where the individual particles are all being pushed in the same way. I also noticed that there was this upswell of Satanic imagery in the world," Timonen said.

"So you would see evil obviously rising on all these different fronts and at the same time people are celebrating Satanism, claiming that it's all just in good fun. Is this not just a coincidence, this working together, how many coincidence am I going to allow before I say maybe there is something else at work here," he explained.

That's when Timonen ceased being an atheist, because he realized the supernatural had to be acknowledged and considered. He and his family moved to Texas, where they found a culture vibrantly open to and publicly celebrating Christianity in a thousand informal ways.

One thing led to another: They began homeschooling their daughter, and they checked out a church. "We saw the fruit, we saw there was a difference, that people treated each other better, there was more respect. And I think it all goes back to the idea of the soul," he said.

Timonen also saw that a lot of the resistance to the tyranny of the COVID pandemic came from churches and the people attending them. Those people have "the firm foundation that Jesus spoke of. If you don't have that firm foundation, the world has a much easier time of it in pushing you around," Timonen realized.

So Timonen and his wife began a thorough reevaluation of their understanding of Jesus and Christianity. They dug into questions such as: Can the Gospel accounts of Jesus' life be trusted? Did Jesus really exist? Can we trust what people said about His life?

"And then you have to wrestle with is He who He said He is," Timonen said. He dove into "Cold-Case Christianity" by J. Warner Wallace and "The Case for Christ" by Lee Strobel. He became convinced the death and resurrection of Jesus could not be denied or rationalized away.

Today, the Timonens are active followers of Christ.

You can watch Timonen explain all this here. I wonder what Dawkins is thinking after at least two of his closer associates, Timonen and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have both abandoned for Christianity the atheism that Dawkins has devoted his life to promoting.

Should Pastors Leave Politics Alone?

The IRS declared on Monday that church pastors henceforth would be free to discuss politics from the pulpit without jeopardizing the church's tax exemption.

Cal Thomas views this relaxation of what was called the Johnson rule after then-Senator and future president Lyndon Johnson with a bit of caution. First, though, he explains the Johnson rule:

The root of the ban extends back to 1954. Then-Senator Lyndon Johnson (D-TX) was running for re-election and faced a primary challenge from a wealthy rancher and oilman. A nonprofit conservative group published materials that recommended voters support Johnson's challenger.

In what many believed to be retribution, Johnson introduced an amendment to Section 501 (c)(3) of the IRS Code, prohibiting organizations that are tax-exempt from trying to influence political campaigns.

Many took this as an attempt to muzzle preachers.

The measure was rarely, if ever enforced. Many Black and white liberal preachers invited mostly Democratic candidates to their services close to elections, giving them tacit, if not outright, endorsements. Their tax-exempt status was never canceled.

Thomas proceeds to explain why the new freedom to broach politics from the pulpit is fraught with pitfalls:

On one level this is a freedom of speech issue, but not all freedoms are necessarily worth exercising. The larger question is: who benefits the most and least from the IRS ruling? Some politicians will benefit, but churches that see this as an opportunity to jump into the political waters will be harmed as they will dilute their primary mission.

Besides, many churches have members who hold different political views. For the pastor to engage in partisan politics runs the risk of having some of them leave. I would.

There has always been a presumption among those advocating for more political involvement by churches that members are ignorant about politics and can't form their own opinions without instructions from their preacher. Organizations - liberal, but mostly conservative - have raised a lot of money promoting a fusion between church and state.

I don't attend church services to hear about politics. Neither do I wish to hear theological pronouncements from politicians, many of whom misquote Scripture, or take it out of context to fit their political agendas.

....Politicians and preachers should mostly stay in their own lanes. Where Scripture speaks clearly to a contemporary issue, including marriage, gender, abortion and the wisdom found in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, I'm ready to listen. But don't let me hear who the pastor prefers in the next election. I am not without information and neither is anyone else if they take the time to do research.

Here, though, lies a difficulty. Thomas is right to urge pastors to refrain from endorsing candidates, but no pastor should refrain from preaching on issues that touch on morality or on social policy that affects the church. Yet, in doing so an implicit endorsement of one or another candidate will be unavoidable.

Social issues are inextricably knotted up with politics and to explicitly preach on the former is to tacitly preach on the latter. This has always been the case as a reading of the Gospels and the book of Acts makes clear. If a pastor takes a strong stand against abortion or in favor of open borders, he's tacitly taking a strong stand against the Democrats in the first case and against the Republicans in the second.

Toward the end of his column Thomas says, "One of the reasons cited for the decline in church attendance in America is that many, especially young people, believe churches are already too political and identified with the Republican Party."

This is doubtless true, and it should serve as a warning to pastors to not assume that everyone in their audience is going to be sympathetic to their opinions, but that applies to almost any topic that a preacher might sermonize on whether moral, theological, or political. A pastor who preaches on abortion, climate change, gay marriage, or the role of women in the church, for instance, is just as likely to antagonize members of his congregation as a pastor who endorses a political candidate from the pulpit.

Pastors have a difficult job. They need to walk a tightrope, avoiding needless offense on the one hand while being faithful to Scripture on the other. It's often not an easy task, and a pastor who ventures out on the tightrope is an intrepid soul, indeed.

Moreover, the members of his or her congregation should have the maturity to be able to disagree with their pastor with grace and love, and not take offense just because they heard something from the pulpit that conflicts with their own moral, theological, or political convictions.

We need wisdom in the pulpit and grace in the pews.

How Trump Might Address the Illegal Alien Problem

I first wrote this post back in 2010 and have reposted it several times since then, most recently last April. I've made a few minor changes and thought that, given the current controversy surrounding illegal immigration, it might be worthwhile to offer it again:

There are said to be 11 million illegal aliens currently in the U.S., most of whom were let into the country by the feckless Biden/ Mayorkis open border policy. President Trump campaigned on deporting them all back to their home countries, an ambition which would seem to be impossible to achieve, especially humanely, given the numbers of people that would have to be moved.

I'd like to offer a few suggestions as to how the Trump administration might proceed in a way that I believe finds the best balance between both justice and compassion.

The issue is contentious, to be sure, but I think the American people would be willing to accept a two-stage measure which looks something like this:

The first stage would guarantee that a border wall be completed where feasible and the entire border secured. This is the sine qua non of any serious immigration reform [1]. There's no point in painting the house while the ceiling is still leaking.

Once our borders are impervious to all but the most dauntless and determined, and once this has been duly certified by a trustworthy authority or commission, then the situation of those already here could be addressed, but not until.

After certification, any subsequent plan for what to do with those already in the country illegally could be crafted to avoid the worst elements of amnesty and yet demonstrate compassion for people desperate to make a decent living.

To that end, once the border is secure, I believe Congress would find public support for legislation that allows illegals to stay in the country indefinitely as "guest workers" with no penalty if the following provisos were also adopted and enforced:

1) Illegal aliens who've lived and worked here for a length of time to be decided upon by Congress would be required to apply for a government identification card, similar to the "green card", which would entitle them to guest worker status. After a reasonable grace period anyone without proper ID would be subject to deportation. This would be a one-time opportunity so that aliens entering the country illegally in the future would be unable to legally acquire a card.

2) No one who had entered the country illegally would at any time be eligible for citizenship (unless they leave the country and reapply through proper channels). Nor would they be entitled to the benefits of citizens. They would not be eligible to vote, or to receive food stamps, unemployment compensation, subsidized housing, AFDC, earned income tax credits, social security, Medicare, etc. Nor would they be counted on the census.

They would have limited access to taxpayer largesse, although churches and other private charitable organizations would be free to render whatever assistance they wish. Whatever taxes immigrant workers pay would be part of the price of living and working here.

3) Their children, born on our soil, would no longer be granted automatic citizenship (This might require amending the 14th amendment of the Constitution), though they could attend public schools. Moreover, these children would become eligible for citizenship at age eighteen provided they graduate from high school, earn a GED, or serve in the military.

4) There would be no "chain" immigration. Those who entered illegally would not be permitted to bring their families here. If they wish to see their loved ones they should return home.

5) Any felonious criminal activity, past or present, would be sufficient cause for immediate deportation [2], as would multiple misdemeanors or any serious or multiple infractions of the motor vehicle code. Immigrants who illegally entered more recently would also be subject to deportation.

6) There would be no penalty for businesses which employ guest workers, and workers would be free to seek employment anywhere they can find it. Neither the workers nor their employers would have to live in fear of ICE.

This is just an outline, of course, and there would be many details to be worked out, but what it proposes would be both simpler and fairer than either mass deportation or amnesty. Those who have followed the rules for citizenship wouldn't be leap-frogged by those who didn't, and illegals who have proper ID would benefit by being able to work without fear of being caught.

The long-term cost to taxpayers of illegal immigration would be considerably reduced, trouble-makers among the immigrant population would be deported, and American businesses would not be responsible for background investigations of job applicants.

It would also provide incentive for American youngsters to get an education and acquire skills so they don't have to compete for jobs with unskilled immigrants willing to work for lower wages. The one group that would "lose" would be the politicians who wish to pad their party's voter rolls by counting illegal aliens on the census and/or awarding them citizenship. They'd be out of luck.

Of course, this proposal won't satisfy those who insist that we send all illegals packing, nor will it please those who think the requirements for letting them stay are too stringent, but it seems to be a simple, practical, just, and humane solution to the problem.

To be sure, it entails a kind of amnesty, but it doesn't reward illegals with the benefits of citizenship as would amnesty, and it conditions allowing immigrants to remain in the U.S. upon stanching the flow of illegals across the border and also upon immigrants keeping themselves out of trouble while they're here.

If, however, these conditions for being allowed to work in this country prove to be too onerous, if illegal immigrants conclude they could do better elsewhere, they would, of course, be free to leave.

[1] The border has been effectively secured since Mr. Trump took office, and the recently passed BBB will make a secured border more permanent.
[2] This process is currently underway.

Identity Politics Is a Primal Scream

R.R.Reno at First Things (subscription required) once wrote a brief review of Mary Eberstadt's book Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. In the book she makes a very interesting point about today's "identity politics."

Here are some excerpts from Reno's review:

Many diagnose identity politics as a consequence of “cultural Marxism,” an invasion of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. Mary Eberstadt takes a more sympathetic and persuasive view. In her latest book, Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics, she interprets today’s feverish insistence on race, sex, and sexual orientation as so many desperate attempts by atomized, disoriented people to figure out their places in the world.

“The Great Scattering,” the weakening and fracturing of family life by the sexual revolution, brings disorientation. It has deprived two generations of the “natural habitat of the human animal,” the stable context in which we see ourselves as sons and daughters carrying forward an intact family legacy. As a consequence, the profound question Who am I? becomes more and more difficult to answer.

We’re left with the “clamor over identity.” Our current fixation on issues of race and sex is incoherent, but it is an authentic primal scream born of the need to belong.

Primal Screams continues Eberstadt’s analysis of the cultural revolutions that came to a head during the 1960s, especially the sexual revolution and its disintegration of the family. Her 2014 book, How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization, demonstrated the connection between the decline in family stability and decreased religiosity.

Taken together, these trends strip away the strong, identity-defining institutions that formerly provided people with a stable, multifaceted sense of self. Today, with neither a Father in heaven nor a father at home, young people cast about for sources of belonging, turning to the ersatz paternity of identity politics, a view that unites people around DNA, sexual practices, and shared grievances.

For thousands of years people in the West felt themselves anchored by family, faith and place. Few worried about such arcane abstractions as identity. They didn't launch themselves on psychological journeys to "find themselves." They didn't ask, "Who am I?"

Then faith began its collapse in the West in the mid-19th century and family collapse followed a century later. Modern mobility has exacerbated the sense of unmooring by enabling many to leave the place of their birth and childhood. Thus, many today are uprooted from place, from faith, and from family and consequently feel alienated, lost, and identityless.

Reno continues:

And it’s not just children without fathers. We are witnessing a sharp increase in the percentage of adults who have no children, or only one. The bonds linking generations and siblings have weakened. Cast into the world alone—often as a consequence of contraceptive technologies and our own choices—we nevertheless seek a collective identity. Feminism is one coping strategy, Eberstadt argues; androgyny and the blurring of male-female differences is another.

“Whom do I love? is another way of answering Who am I?” writes Eberstadt....The Great Scattering has loosened the bonds of love. This was not the intention of the sexual revolution, perhaps, but it has been its effect. We now live in a love-impoverished culture, which means we have a difficult time knowing who we are.

As Eberstadt observes,

Anyone who has ever heard a coyote in the desert, separated at night from its pack, knows the sound. The otherwise unexplained hysteria of today’s identity politics is nothing more, or less, than just that: the collective human howl of our time, sent up by inescapably communal creatures trying desperately to identify their own.

Back in the 1960s existentialist philosophers like Jean Paul Sartre and his mistress Simone de Beauvoir argued that there's no fixed human nature, no way we have to be, that we are what we make of ourselves, we are what we feel ourselves to be.

Combine that thinking with the loss of belief in God and two generations later we have countless numbers of young people who are conflicted about their race, their gender, their sexual orientation, and much else.

It's no wonder they're asking the question, "Who am I?"

The New Atheism Grown Old

Ben Sixsmith at ARC declares the decease of what for the last couple of decades has been called the "New Atheism" and undertakes a postmortem which he concludes with a few especially interesting remarks. He opines, for example that:

I think the New Atheists receive both too much and too little credit. Consider a recent tweet sent out by Bret Weinstein, a biologist associated with the Intellectual Dark Web:

Some of history’s darkest chapters involved brutal coercion of people because they didn’t accept that “Jesus is the son of God.” Assuming Christians have outgrown that inclination, they’d be wise to quit broadcasting this exclusionary claim. Seems obvious. What am I missing?

He was missing an awful lot, actually. He was missing the fact that, by this logic, atheists should “quit broadcasting” the “exclusionary claim” that there is no God, given the “brutal coercion of people” in the Reign of Terror, the Russian Revolution, the Red Terror in Spain, the Cultural Revolution, and so on.

But he was also missing the fact that if Christians stopped maintaining that Jesus is the son of God, they would not be Christians.

He also adds this perspicuous observation:

The greatest enemies of religious believers are not, then, atheists who reject the idea of God’s existence, but apatheists who don’t consider the subject relevant.

He's surely right about that, especially since those among the New Atheists who have assayed to offer arguments against the reasonableness of belief in God in general and Christian belief in particular have never failed to fail miserably. Sixsmith makes the same point:

To be sure, New Atheists could be very, very bad at arguing that God does not exist. There was, for example, Lawrence Krauss writing a book about how something can come from nothing while attributing material qualities to ["nothing"]. There was Richard Dawkins trying to refute the famous “Five Ways” of Aquinas without even attempting to understand [Aquinas's] terms. (“Whereof one cannot speak,” groaned Wittgenstein, “Thereof one must remain silent.”)

There was Christopher Hitchens striding into philosophy like an elephant onto an ice skating rink and saying that the postulate of a designer or creator only raises the unanswerable question of who designed the designer or created the creator.

Why is the question unanswerable? People have certainly tried to answer it. Answers readily came centuries prior to Hitchens himself, actually. Hitchens is free to take issue with Aquinas’ distinction between contingent and necessary existence if he wants, but he’s not free to suggest that no answers have been offered.

How does the concept of the “necessary being,” for example, fail? Hitchens offers no sign of knowing what it is, because that “unanswerable” is not a logical conclusion but a rhetorical sledgehammer swung at the reader’s skull.

He adds that the New Atheists can make better arguments, and he's correct, although it's hard to find among philosophical anti-theistic arguments one that hasn't been met with a convincing counterargument:

I know atheists can make better arguments. But the New Atheists never felt obliged to, because they were so confident in their own rationality that they never learned about the ideas they were mocking. If challenged on their philosophical ignorance ... they were liable to observe that the average Christian does not have the theological sophistication of [a theistic philosopher].

But so what? That's like declaring Darwinism to be refuted because the average man on the street who accepts it can't give an explanation of it as sophisticated as a college biology professor could.

Sixsmith concludes with this:

Still, for all their errors, the New Atheists were right that certain matters raise questions that demand a serious attempt to resolve. Does God exist? Does life have objective significance or does it not? Is there an objective moral code or is there not? Is there an afterlife?

These are not questions we as individuals or societies can sidestep. A principled inquiry into these kinds of things may catch fewer eyes than a tribally-sorted debate about, say, gender differences or free speech on Youtube. But this is no failing for the people who insist on having the argument anyway. Richard Dawkins may be wrong about many things, but he was right about that.