The Left's Resort to Violence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Justice notes that,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biden's Team

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hanson concludes with these words:

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

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

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

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

Two Political Disadvantages

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

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

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

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

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

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

His next point is also noteworthy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Born That Way

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

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

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

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

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

Kaufmann's findings point to,

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

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

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

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

Nature's Light Bulb

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer Reading

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

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

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

Thanks, and best wishes for a great summer.

Hanson's Trumpology

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

Here are some excerpts from his column:

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

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

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

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

So, will Trump run?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps, but, Hanson writes,

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

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

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

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

Hanson adds some interesting predictions about the Democratic 2024 field:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on the Jon Stewart/Andrew Sullivan Contretemps

Columnist Andrew Sullivan was invited recently to appear on Jon Stewart's show to discuss race, and, according to Sullivan, the show was something of a train wreck. He felt that he was ambushed, but more than that Stewart delivered a monologue which, in Sullivan's opinion, grossly distorted the facts about race in this country.

Sullivan replied to Stewart's diatribe in his Substack column and I discussed some of his response in an earlier post on VP.

Here's more on his reaction to Stewart in which he lays out some facts that need to be articulated far more often than they are.

The entire dynamic of the [Stewart] show mirrored, it seems to me, the dynamic of the imposition of critical race theory across our society. You can see the technique everywhere. You start with the obscenity of slavery; you talk constantly of history; you lay out Reconstruction, lynching, Jim Crow, segregation and the other brutalities of the past.

So far, so good. That’s vital work — and we should pay tribute and close attention to it.

But the point of CRT is not to educate people about how appallingly African-Americans were once treated in this country, to construct an account of the progress since then, to note the Americans of all races who helped make a difference, and then to propose specific policies that might help move us further forward, into a more perfect union.

No, the whole point is to insist that this history is still the reality, that the structure of American society is no different in kind than in 1619, and that its democracy was designed from the beginning to brutalize non-whites forever. This is what we’re debating. No one is trying to minimize the pain of black suffering over the centuries, or debate whether systemic racism existed in America. Of course it did.

What we’re debating is how much those previous systems — repealed in their entirety nearly 60 years ago — explains resilient inequality today.

This is a good point. Often when people cite examples of racial injustice they reach back thirty or forty years to fetch examples. The question is, though, what's the situation in America today?

So when I asked Stewart to delineate “structural racism,” he reflexively listed a bunch of “systems” that no longer exist: post-war redlining, the GI bill, and so on....[In] America in 2022, the only formal legal systems that openly advocate race discrimination are discriminating in favor of African-Americans, not against them.

Affirmative action was only supposed to be a temporary diversion from liberal principles. It’s now a permanent system of race discrimination to favor blacks over every other demographic, disproportionately harming Asian-Americans. The federal government now enforces it across every department.

And even with past systems, the debate about their impact is still a live one. Take racial redlining. This profoundly hurt African-Americans moving out of the South. But class mattered a lot too.

Does Stewart know that 85 percent of households in redlined areas were occupied by whites? Or that the infamous maps with red areas probably had nothing to do with the problem? Or that, even if you go by those maps, the picture today is much more complicated than Stewart would ever acknowledge:

[About 11 million Americans] live in once-redlined areas, according to the latest population data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (2017). This population is majority-minority but not majority-Black, and, contrary to conventional perceptions, Black residents also do not form a plurality in these areas overall.

The Black population share is approximately 28%, ranking third among the racial groups who live in formerly redlined areas, behind white and Latino or Hispanic residents.

Or take the strength of white supremacy in the early 20th century, later overcome by the Civil Rights Movement. You’d expect to see terrible data for black family life in the dark days of white supremacist America under Jim Crow, with only a resurgence of wealth and stability after civil rights took hold. In reality, we see the opposite: real progress for African-Americans before the 1960s:

[B]etween 1940 and 1960, the percentage of black families with income below the poverty level was almost cut in half, from 87 percent to 47 percent. In key skilled trades, the income of blacks relative to whites more than doubled between 1936 and 1959, while black income rose absolutely and relative to white income across the board from 1939 to 1960.

Or take the impact of family structure. A very solid finding in social science is that the key ingredient for success in America is being raised by two parents in the home, and getting married.

It logically follows that when 84 percent of Asian kids grow up in a two-parent household, and only 33 percent of black kids do, you don’t need some abstract notion of “white supremacy” to explain why Asian-Americans, even the poorest, have sailed past African-Americans in educational success.

Is the poor family structure itself caused by the impact of white supremacy? The data show that the black family was actually more intact before the Civil Rights Movement than after it. And marriage in general was more valued:

From 1890 through 1940, black women tended to marry earlier than white women did…. In 1950, black women aged 40–44 were actually more likely to have ever married than were white women of the same age. Racial differences in marriage remained modest as recently as 1970, when 94.8 percent of white women and 92.2 percent of black women had ever been married.

And again, the importance of family structure isn’t limited to black Americans, of course:

Being raised in a married-couple household led the poverty rate for black children to go down 73 percent compared to mother-only households and 67 percent compared to father-only households. And as evidence of the power of family structure to transcend race, 31 percent of white children raised in mother-only households live in poverty, versus just 12 percent of black children living with their married parents. That is a stunning realization.

Being married brings you into a higher wealth bracket, with pooled earnings — which also accounts for some of the wealth gap. Age also matters for stats like median earnings. As Glenn Loury puts it, “Citing only the median in debates about the racial wealth gap … suggests that the wealth gap is more pervasive than it appears.”

The median white American, for example, is 44 and married, whereas the median black American is 34 and single. That’s worthwhile context.

He might've also mentioned the enormous advantage married couples have due to the fact that they often have two sets of parents to help them with finances, babysitting, emotional support, etc. A single mother often has only her mother, who's often also single, to help her.

Sullivan doesn't deny that racism exists, but he does argue that it's far less common and less pernicious than it was a generation or two ago:

In 1958, for example, four percent of Americans approved of marriage between blacks and whites; today, it’s 94 percent. If you think that’s evidence of the permanence of “white supremacy,” I don’t know what to tell you.

In 2019, the black unemployment rate and black poverty rate reached all-time lows.

[I don't want] to ignore the historical legacy of public and private discrimination. I’m just saying any explanation for racial disparities today is much more complex than simply intoning “white supremacy,” and implicitly dismissing any notion of other factors, or any black agency at all.

Yes, but complexity is the bane of the ideologue. Better to keep to simplistic slogans like "white supremacy" and "structural racism" than to have to have to account for inconvenient facts.

The Sack of Constantinople

Last Saturday, May 29th, was the anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the Muslims in 1453. The city had held out against Muslim attacks for seven centuries, but the Muslims were determined to take it, and their leader mustered a hundred thousand men to bring against the fortress.

Ever since that day the city, today called Istanbul, has been a Muslim city.

Raymond Ibrahim at PJ Media gives a fascinating account of the battle. He begins by discussing the significance of its fall:

[Not] only was Constantinople a living and direct extension of the old Roman Empire and current capital of the Christian Roman Empire (or Byzantium), but its cyclopean walls had prevented Islam from entering Europe through its eastern doorway for the previous seven centuries, beginning with the First Arab Siege of Constantinople (674-678).

When Muslim forces failed again in the Second Arab Siege of Constantinople (717-718), conquering the ancient Christian capital became something of an obsession for a succession of caliphates and sultanates. However, it was only with the rise of the Ottoman sultanate — so named after its eponymous Turkic founder, Osman (b.1258) — that conquering the city, which was arguably better fortified than any other in the world, became a possibility, not least in thanks to the concomitant spread of gunpowder and cannons from China to Eurasia.

By 1400, his descendants had managed to invade and conquer a significant portion of the southern Balkans — thereby isolating and essentially turning Constantinople into a Christian island in an Islamic sea.

Enter Sultan Mehmet, or Muhammad II (r. 1451-1481) — “the mortal enemy of the Christians,” to quote a contemporary prelate. (Note: “Mehmet” is simply an English transliteration of the Turkish pronunciation of “Muhammad.”)

On becoming sultan in 1451, Constantinople sent a diplomatic embassy to congratulate him; the 19-year-old responded by telling them what they sought to hear. He “swore by the god of their false prophet, by the prophet whose name he bore,” a bitter Christian contemporary retrospectively wrote, that “he was their friend, and would remain for the whole of his life a friend and ally of the City and its ruler Constantine [XI].”

Although they believed him, Muhammad was taking advantage of “the basest arts of dissimulation and deceit,” wrote Edward Gibbon. “Peace was on his lips while war was in his heart.”

What was in his heart soon became apparent. Throughout the spring of 1453, the city watched helplessly as Ottoman battalion after battalion made its way to and surrounded Constantinople by land and sea. One contemporary remarked that Muhammad’s “army seemed as numberless as grains of sand, spread . . . across the land from shore to shore.”

In the end, some one hundred thousand fighters and one hundred warships came.

Few Western Europeans came to Constantinople’s aid. In the end, less than seven thousand fighters, two thousand of whom were foreigners, made ready to protect fifteen miles of walls, while only twenty-six Christian ships patrolled the harbor.

Ibrahim goes on to recount the details of the battle which must have been horrific, and also the motivations of the Muslim armies. It was not glory to Allah, but the promise of plunder in gold and slaves.

Read Ibrahim's account at the link. Also, if you're looking for fascinating summer reading and are interested in the conflict between Muslims and the West from the seventh century to modern times, his book Sword and Scimitar is highly recommended.

Liberal Dilemmas

In the wake of the horrible atrocity in Uvalde, Texas calls to ban guns, or curtail ownership of firearms, have once again echoed through the media and the culture. It reminds me of a post I wrote several years ago and which I thought would be relevant today. Here it is:

There's a news report out of Oklahoma fraught with difficulties, in my opinion, for liberal progressives who wish to ban guns. Bre Peyton summarizes the events:

An Oklahoma man used a revolver to stop a neighbor from killing his three-month-old twin children last Friday.

Leland Foster was allegedly trying to drown his twin babies, one boy and one girl, in the bathtub of his Ada, Oklahoma home after threatening their mother with a knife. Then his neighbor intervened, according to KOFR-TV.

A 12-year-old girl who was living in the house ran to seek help from her neighbor, Cash Freeman, who saved the babies’ lives by shooting Foster twice in the back with a revolver, which killed him.

Foster has a violent criminal record. In 2011, he pled guilty to domestic abuse by strangulation and arson in the first degree.

Freeman told reporters he’s worried he might get into trouble for saving the babies’ lives. According to KOFR, Ada police said the incident would go before the district attorney, who will decide if the homicide was justified. Police said they questioned Freeman just after the incident and released him.

The babies were flown to a nearby hospital and have since been released.

Here are six questions for my liberal progressive friends:

1. Should Mr. Freeman have been allowed to own a firearm?
2. Should he be allowed by law to have used a firearm to shoot Mr. Foster to save the children?
3. Should Mr. Foster have the right to kill his three-month-old children?
4. If the answer to #3 is no, at what point should the life of a child be protected by law?
5. What is the rationale for drawing the line at that point?
6. Should the cop who fought off the Islamic terrorists on London Bridge with his nightstick, or the defenseless cop in Paris who was murdered by the Islamic terrorists who perpetrated the Charlie Hebdo atrocity in 2015, been armed with a gun?

Dilemmas, dilemmas.

A Time to Honor Courage

Memorial Day was originally established to honor those who lost their lives in service to our country in time of war, but it's appropriate on this day to remember not only the sacrifice of those who never came home, but also the sacrifices and character of men like those described in these accounts from the war in Iraq:

A massive truck bomb had turned much of the Fort Lewis soldiers’ outpost to rubble. One of their own lay dying and many others wounded. Some 50 al-Qaida fighters were attacking from several directions with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. It was obvious that the insurgents had come to drive the platoon of Stryker brigade troops out of Combat Outpost Tampa, a four-story concrete building overlooking a major highway through western Mosul, Iraq.

“It crossed my mind that that might be what they were going to try to do,” recalled Staff Sgt. Robert Bernsten, one of 40 soldiers at the outpost that day. “But I wasn’t going to let that happen, and looking around I could tell nobody else in 2nd platoon was going to let that happen, either.”

He and 10 other soldiers from the same unit – the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment – would later be decorated for their valor on this day of reckoning, Dec. 29, 2004. Three were awarded the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest award for heroism in combat. When you combine those medals with two other Silver Star recipients involved in different engagements, the battalion known as “Deuce Four” stands in elite company. The Army doesn’t track the number of medals per unit, but officials said there could be few, if any, other battalions in the Iraq war to have so many soldiers awarded the Silver Star.

“I think this is a great representation of our organization,” said the 1-24’s top enlisted soldier, Command Sgt. Maj. Robert Prosser, after a battalion award ceremony late last month at Fort Lewis. “There are so many that need to be recognized. … There were so many acts of heroism and valor.”

The fight for COP Tampa came as Deuce Four was just two months into its year-long mission in west Mosul. The battalion is part of Fort Lewis’ second Stryker brigade. In the preceding weeks, insurgents had grown bolder in their attacks in the city of 2 million. Just eight days earlier, a suicide bomber made his way into a U.S. chow hall and killed 22 people, including two from Deuce Four.

The battalion took over the four-story building overlooking the busy highway and set up COP Tampa after coming under fire from insurgents holed up there. The troops hoped to stem the daily roadside bombings of U.S. forces along the highway, called route Tampa. Looking back, the Dec. 29 battle was a turning point in the weeks leading up to Iraq’s historic first democratic election.

The enemy “threw everything they had into this,” Bernsten said. “And you know in the end, they lost quite a few guys compared to the damage they could do to us. “They didn’t quit after that, but they definitely might have realized they were up against something a little bit tougher than they originally thought.”

The battle for COP Tampa was actually two fights – one at the outpost, and the other on the highway about a half-mile south.

About 3:20 p.m., a large cargo truck packed with 50 South African artillery rounds and propane tanks barreled down the highway toward the outpost, according to battalion accounts.

Pfc. Oscar Sanchez, on guard duty in the building, opened fire on the truck, killing the driver and causing the explosives to detonate about 75 feet short of the building. Sanchez, 19, was fatally wounded in the blast. Commanders last month presented his family with a Bronze Star for valor and said he surely saved lives. The enormous truck bomb might have destroyed the building had the driver been able to reach the ground-floor garages.

As it was, the enormous explosion damaged three Strykers parked at the outpost and wounded 17 of the 40 or so soldiers there, two of them critically.

Bernsten was in a room upstairs. “It threw me. It physically threw me. I opened my eyes and I’m laying on the floor a good 6 feet from where I was standing a split second ago,” he said. “There was nothing but black smoke filling the building.” People were yelling for each other, trying to find out if everyone was OK.

“It seemed like it was about a minute, and then all of a sudden it just opened up from everywhere. Them shooting at us. Us shooting at them,” Bernsten said. The fight would rage for the next two hours. Battalion leaders said videotape and documents recovered later showed it was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq fighters. They were firing from rooftops, from street corners, from cars, Bernsten said.

Eventually, Deuce Four soldiers started to run low on ammunition. Bernsten, a squad leader, led a team of soldiers out into the open, through heavy fire, to retrieve more from the damaged Strykers. “We went to the closest vehicle first and grabbed as much ammo as we could, and got it upstairs and started to distribute it,” he said. “When you hand a guy a magazine and they’re putting the one you just handed them into their weapon, you realize they’re getting pretty low. So we knew we had to go back out there for more.”

He didn’t necessarily notice there were rounds zipping past as he and the others ran the 100 feet or so to the Strykers. “All you could see was the back of the Stryker you were trying to get to.”

Another fight raged down route Tampa, where a convoy of six Strykers, including the battalion commander’s, had rolled right into a field of hastily set roadside bombs. The bombs hadn’t been there just five minutes earlier, when the convoy had passed by going the other way after a visit to the combat outpost. It was an ambush set up to attack whatever units would come to the aid of COP Tampa.

Just as soldiers in the lead vehicle radioed the others that there were bombs in the road, the second Stryker was hit by a suicide car bomber. Staff Sgt. Eddieboy Mesa, who was inside, said the blast tore off the slat armor cage and equipment from the right side of the vehicle, and destroyed its tires and axles and the grenade launcher mounted on top. But no soldiers were seriously injured.

Insurgents opened fire from the west and north of the highway. Stryker crewmen used their .50-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers to destroy a second car bomb and two of the bombs rigged in the roadway. Three of the six Strykers pressed on to COP Tampa to join the fight.

One, led by battalion operations officer Maj. Mark Bieger, loaded up the critically wounded and raced back onto the highway through the patch of still-unstable roadside bombs. It traveled unescorted the four miles or so to a combat support hospital. Bieger and his men are credited with saving the lives of two soldiers.

Then he and his men turned around and rejoined the fight on the highway. Bieger was one of those later awarded the Silver Star. Meantime, it was left to the soldiers still on the road to defend the heavily damaged Stryker and clear the route of the remaining five bombs.

Staff Sgt. Wesley Holt and Sgt. Joseph Martin rigged up some explosives and went, under fire, from bomb to bomb to prepare them for demolition. They had no idea whether an insurgent was watching nearby, waiting to detonate the bombs. Typically, this was the kind of situation where infantry soldiers would call in the ordnance experts. But there was no time, Holt said.

“You could see the IEDs right out in the road. I knew it was going to be up to us to do it,” Holt said. “Other units couldn’t push through. The colonel didn’t want to send any more vehicles through the kill zone until we could clear the route.” And so they prepared their charges under the cover of the Strykers, then ran out to the bombs, maybe 50 yards apart. The two men needed about 30 seconds to rig each one as incoming fire struck around them.

“You could hear it [enemy fire] going, but where they were landing I don’t know,” Holt said. “You concentrate on the main thing that’s in front of you.” He and Martin later received Silver Stars.

The route clear, three other Deuce Four platoons moved out into the neighborhoods and F/A-18 fighter jets made more than a dozen runs to attack enemy positions with missiles and cannon fire. “It was loud, but it was a pretty joyous sound,” Bernsten said. “You know that once that’s happened, you have the upper hand in such a big way. It’s like the cavalry just arrived, like in the movies.”

Other soldiers eventually received Bronze Stars for their actions that day, too.

Sgt. Christopher Manikowski and Sgt. Brandon Huff pulled wounded comrades from their damaged Strykers and carried them over open ground, under fire, to the relative safety of the building.

Sgt. Nicholas Furfari and Spc. Dennis Burke crawled out onto the building’s rubbled balcony under heavy fire to retrieve weapons and ammunition left there after the truck blast.

Also decorated with Bronze Stars for their valor on Dec. 29 were Lt. Jeremy Rockwell and Spc. Steven Sosa. U.S. commanders say they killed at least 25 insurgents. Deuce Four left the outpost unmanned for about three hours that night, long enough for engineers to determine whether it was safe to re-enter. Troops were back on duty by morning, said battalion commander Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla.

In the next 10 months, insurgents would continue to attack Deuce Four troops in west Mosul with snipers, roadside bombs and suicide car bombs. But never again would they mass and attempt such a complex attack.

Heroics on two other days earned Silver Stars for Deuce Four.

It was Aug. 19, and Sgt. Major Robert Prosser’s commander, Lt. Col. Erik Kurilla, had been shot down in front of him. Bullets hit the ground and walls around him. Prosser charged under fire into a shop, not knowing how many enemy fighters were inside. There was one, and Prosser shot him four times in the chest, then threw down his empty rifle and fought hand-to-hand with the man.

The insurgent pulled Prosser’s helmet over his eyes. Prosser got his hands onto the insurgent’s throat, but couldn’t get a firm grip because it was slick with blood.

Unable to reach his sidearm or his knife, and without the support of any other American soldiers Prosser nonetheless disarmed and subdued the insurgent by delivering a series of powerful blows to the insurgent’s head, rendering the man unconscious.

Another Silver Star recipient, Staff Sgt. Shannon Kay, received the award for his actions on Dec. 11, 2004. He helped save the lives of seven members of his squad after they were attacked by a suicide bomber and insurgents with rockets and mortars at a traffic checkpoint.

He and others used fire extinguishers to save their burning Stryker vehicle and killed at least eight enemy fighters. Throughout the fight, Kay refused medical attention despite being wounded in four places.

For men like these and the millions of others whose courage and sacrifice have for two hundred and fifty years enabled the rest of us to live in relative freedom and security, we should all thank God.

Judgmentalism

Years ago it was fairly common to hear conservatives and/or Christians criticized for being "judgmental" for alleging that tragedy or disaster was God's punishment for personal or national sins. Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment on New Orleans for its decadence. 9/11 was God's judgment on the U.S. for our moral corruption.

Such claims were ill-considered and foolish and deserved ridicule, but whether someone is guilty of "judgmentalism" appears to depend a lot on who's doing the judging.

For instance, Jim Geraghty talks about this in his column at National Review where he writes that,

During the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, a lot of Americans had to learn or realize that, whatever you felt morally about a homosexual’s behavior in the bedroom, no one deserved to die a painful death because of those actions. AIDS was not God’s judgment on gay people; a loving God doesn’t sit around thinking up new ways to inflict pain upon His creations, even for violating His commandments.

We had to separate our views of particular actions and their morality from the need to help the suffering.

Geraghty is right, of course, but in recent years things have changed. Self-righteousness, intolerance and judgmentalism, once considered at best boorish, have become socially acceptable, especially on the left. Geraghty continues:

And then Covid-19 came along, and it became really socially acceptable to pass moral judgment on those who contracted a dangerous contagious disease.

Some of us argued against this, over and over again, but there were plenty of finger-wagging, self-righteous social-media scolds who insisted that those who had caught Covid-19 must have failed to wear a mask, or failed to social distance, or had somehow failed to follow the rules.

Yes, there's no monopoly on sanctimoniousness in our society. With this in mind it'll be interesting to see how people react to the latest health hazard should it reach our shores. Geraghty again:

I mention all this because there’s a good chance that the recent monkeypox outbreak is, er, connected to certain behaviors and actions: “A leading adviser to the World Health Organization described the unprecedented outbreak of monkeypox in developed countries as ‘a random event’ that appears to have been caused by sexual activity at two recent raves in Europe.”

A separate report noted that, “Almost all of the case clusters include men aged 20–50, many of whom are men who have sex with men (MSM).”

Monkeypox doesn't appear to be anywhere near as serious as AIDs or Covid, nevertheless, will the same people who chastised anyone who refused to wear a mask or get vaxxed also chastise those who engage in sexual practices that result in the spread of monkeypox?

Probably not. Whether behavior is condemnable too often, for too many people, depends not upon the behavior but upon who engages in it.

For the left the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers were often "Don't Tread on Me" Trumpsters and therefore merited scorn. Those who engage in reckless promiscuous homosexual behavior are, well, engaging in behavior that progressives often find fashionable and therefore demand be treated sympathetically:

“It’s important to pay more attention [to the disease], yes, but it’s a mistake to oversimplify, and, more than anything else, it’s totally wrong to assign any blame,” Tobias Oliveira Weismantel, managing director of the Munich AIDS Hilfe support group, said in an interview. “It’s misguided to attribute it to any particular group.”

“It’s really important to avoid panic and stigmatization,” said Markus Ulrich, a spokesman for Germany’s Lesbian and Gay Federation. “Yet that’s exactly what a lot of gay men are seeing right now in the language from the health minister and Robert Koch Institute. They need to take a look at how they’re communicating this. They need to enlighten without stigmatizing anyone.”

In the U.S., the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Assn. issued a joint statement Thursday condemning the "use of racist and homophobic language" with regard to the monkeypox outbreak.

...Stigma has no place in medicine or public health."

So, to criticize behavior which facilitates the spread of a disease would, in this case, be homophobic bigotry. Criticism of those who refuse to be vaxxed, on the other hand, is righteous reproof of the immoral and ignorant.

How Can We Protect Our Kids?

The terrible tragedy in Uvalde, Texas on Wednesday has once again sparked discussion about why these shootings happen and what can be done to stop them.

I discussed yesterday what I think is wrong with our culture that hate-filled young men have the desire to slaughter children, and today I want to focus on one thing that can be done to stop at least some of these atrocities.

Among the steps that have been proposed by commenters, are these:

1. We can make it illegal to manufacture, sell or own guns, and try to eliminate guns from society.
2. We can pass more laws restricting gun ownership.
3. We can pass "red flag" laws which allow authorities to confiscate weapons from troubled individuals.
4. We can put armed guards in all schools.

Number one, eliminating guns, would solve the problem, of course, but it's virtually impossible. If gun manufacture was banned in the U.S. manufacturers would simply move off-shore, and guns, like drugs, would still be smuggled in and made available to those who wanted them, who would be primarily thugs and other criminals.

Number two is pointless as long as criminals still have guns. Although I would certainly support laws that make it illegal for anyone under 21 to purchase a large magazine semi-automatic rifle, it's foolish to prevent responsible adult gun owners from protecting themselves as long as criminals still have the means to terrorize the innocent.

People have a right to defend themselves and their families, and any government that takes that right away and leaves people defenseless against armed criminals makes itself ipso facto an illegitimate government.

Red flag laws, if properly conceived, should indeed be enacted in every state, but some of the awful massacres that have occurred over the last few decades have been perpetrated by people like the Uvalde murderer who, until just before their rampage, had given scant indication that they could potentially commit a crime.

Others who might have been known to authorities sometimes obtained weapons illegally in "straw" purchases or stealing them from parents.

Putting armed guards in all our elementary and secondary schools would be helpful but also expensive, especially since the vast majority of schools will probably never need the services of an armed guard. Moreover, unless there are several guards it could take precious minutes for a single guard to traverse a building to get to where a shooting is occurring.

(It should be noted that there was an armed guard at the elementary school in Uvalde who was shot and wounded by the gunman.)

There's another option, however, which, though it may not be ideal, is in my mind the most practical. We could loosen gun regulations so that school officials and some select staff can have access to firearms in the building.

I once noted on Viewpoint that:

[Researchers have found] that greater efforts to restrict guns leads, counter, perhaps, to conventional opinion, to more gun crime. [These researchers] make a good case that the "gun-free zones" set up around schools are a farce. Such feel-good nostrums accomplish nothing more than to assure the psychopaths who roam the halls of every large public school in the nation that if they decide to go on a killing rampage there'll be no one able to hinder them.

The allure of exerting total, unstoppable power over others is irresistible to certain twisted minds, and "gun-free zones" don't do anything to keep them from bringing weapons into schools to carry out their horrific fantasies. They only prevent school staff from being in a position to stop them once the carnage begins.

Anyone who smuggles a gun into a school can massacre students for a long time before police arrive, and despite all the precautions that schools take to prevent such tragedies there's really no practical way an unarmed staff can prevent a student who wishes to murder his fellow students from actually doing it.

If at least some appropriate school personnel were thoroughly trained in the use of firearms, particularly in a school environment, and permitted to keep weapons under lock but easily accessible, the chances that someone would attempt, or succeed in an attempt, to perpetrate mass murder in the halls of a school would be greatly diminished.

Some people will understandably blanche at the idea of having guns in school, but the fact is they're already there. Some schools have armed guards roaming their hallways and some have armed kids roaming the hallways. A lot of schools probably have both. The question is not whether we will have guns in our schools - we already do. The question is who in the school do we want to have access to them.

Public school administrators, provided they are trained and licensed, should be allowed to keep firearms under lock and key in their office and certain properly trained classroom teachers should be allowed to do likewise. Had anyone in any of the schools that have been targeted by the deranged nihilists among us been armed many young lives could have been saved.

As it is, in almost every school shooting the shooter was confronted by heroic unarmed teachers or administrators who died trying to protect their students. Had these courageous men and women been trained and armed the outcome may have been much different.

Guns are probably here to stay in our culture, and as long as they are criminals and psychopaths will be able to get them. The answer is not to naively declare schools off-limits to guns, but to let those who would commit mayhem in a school know that they would probably not get far before they were challenged by someone who could shoot back.

There'd be risks, of course, with doing this, but what's the alternative? Not only would armed faculty be more likely to stop the carnage sooner once it starts, the knowledge that faculty, or at least some of them, are armed would have a substantial deterrent effect on at least some who may be inclined to carry out their odious crimes.

It's only because most school killers know that they'll be able to have their way for at least ten minutes before the police arrive to stop them that they even try it. If they knew that they'd have only a minute or two they might not think those few seconds worth the cost.

It's very sad that we've sunk as a society to the point where we need armed and trained adults in our schools (and churches), but, for reasons, some of which I outlined yesterday, that's where we are.

If someone had been able to confront the shooter in Uvalde with a weapon on Wednesday it may have saved many young lives and limited the immense grief the families of the dead children are experiencing today.

That, it seems to me, is the direction in which we should move until the day comes, if it ever does, when we need no longer fear to send our children to school.

Why Does This Keep Happening?

The tragedy at the Texas elementary school this week conjures up a lot of thoughts. Two questions in particular are on everyone's mind: Why do these things keep happening? What can be done to stop them?

I think that the answer to the first question is three-fold. First, too many young people are in the grip of a murderous nihilism because as a society we've rejected the only belief system which gives us any basis for valuing human life and for treating others with respect and kindness.

Second, too many young men have either a terrible relationship with their father or no relationship at all. When a boy is alienated from his father, or has no father in his life, he often turns to violence as a way of expressing his masculinity and venting his resentments.

It would be interesting to see research, if any has been done, on the relationship the young men who commit these horrific crimes have with both God and their biological father. I'm quite sure that the majority of these killers are atheistic materialists, whether they're aware of it or not, and either have no father or have a dysfunctional relationship with him.

Third, many of our young are immersed in a culture of violence and death in which they hear about killing, talk about killing, laugh about killing, and practice killing in their video games for hours every day.

Those three toxic elements form a psycho-emotional time bomb in the soul of a young man which can turn him into a killer.

By abandoning the Judeo-Christian worldview that was the mortar which held our society together for three centuries, and replacing it with an atheistic materialism that offers no ground at all for morality or for conferring worth on other people, we've stripped our young of any basis for thinking of others as valuable in their own right.

In the absence of a God, people are valuable only to the extent that others value them, but atheistic materialism offers no reason why anyone should value any other human being. If we're nothing but animals then, like animals, we can be slaughtered if someone has the power and the inclination to do it.

Likewise, in the absence of an earthly father, young men often seethe with bitterness, alienation and resentments that often lead to anti-social behavior. Indeed, the one commonality among the vast majority of men in prison today is fatherlessness, yet our culture has decided for some perverse reason that fathers aren't really necessary.

Add to the spiritual and emotional emptiness entailed by fatherlessness an entertainment culture of grotesquely violent and pornographic film, music, and video games and the surprise is not that young people wantonly kill but that they don't do it more often than they do.

People immersed in what passes for entertainment in much of our culture become desensitized to death. They learn to see others as targets to be "blown away," not as people to be loved and respected.

Some will object that lots of people play these games, listen to violent music, watch movies depicting mass slaughter, and yet they don't kill others, but this misses the point. People reside on a spectrum at one end of which are the most psychopathic among us. The more we revel in bloodshed and horror the more we get shifted along toward the violent end of the spectrum.

Everyone who feeds on violence becomes a little more desensitized, a little more hardened. Everyone tends to see others as a little less valuable than they would have, and some who would not otherwise be inclined to harbor violent fantasies now do, and some who would not otherwise be inclined to actually carry out their murderous fantasies are pushed further toward exactly that behavior .

Tragedies like last Wednesday's will recur as long as we continue to erode the spiritual foundation upon which any morality must stand and substitute in its stead a culture that glories in violence, death, and horror. Just as we are what we feed our bodies, we are, too, what we feed our minds.

If this is correct, and I'm convinced that it is at least a major part of the problem, then the long-term solution to mass murders in our schools and elsewhere is to recapture the spiritual understanding that we've lost in this country and to reject the culture of death the adults among us so blithely tolerate and our young so eagerly embrace.

We'll take up a possible short-term solution in tomorrow's post.

The Warfare and Other Myths

If you've received a college education in the sciences you've probably been exposed to a one or more of the following myths about the relationship of science and religion:

You've probably heard that science and religion are incompatible and indeed are even "at war" with each other. I've written about this "warfare myth" here and here.

You've probably heard, too, that the ancients, following the Bible, believed that the earth was flat, and you also might've heard that the release of Nicholaus Copernicus' book De Revolutionibus in 1543 debunked the belief, promoted by the Church, that the earth, and thus mankind, enjoyed a privileged place at the center of the universe.

It turns out that each of these commonly held myths is false. Science and religion have never been at war, the ancients did not believe the world was flat, and although prior to Copernicus, it was believed that the earth was at the center of the universe, the center was not believed to be a privileged position. Indeed, it was thought that the center was a sump where all the corruption and offal of the universe accumulated.

Ironically, it turns out that the ancients were correct in one sense, though. With almost every new scientific discovery the universe appears to be more and more anthropocentric. Man is at the ontological center of the universe, as an increasing number of scientists are pointing out, either implicitly or explicitly.

For an example of the latter see geneticist Michael Denton's new book The Miracle of Man in which he catalogs the stunning array of physical and chemical properties of the universe, and thus the laws of physics and chemistry, that are exquisitely calibrated to make human life possible.

Other books have made similar arguments. Lewis and Barnes' A Fortunate Universe, Gonzalez and Richards' Privileged Planet, and Stephen Meyer's Return of the God Hypothesis are just three which come to mind, but there are many more.

But going back to the myths. Historian of science Michael Keas explains why each of them (and one other) is false in this 12 minute video. He also shows how atheists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and the late Christopher Hitchens who subscribe to the myths are simply not very well-informed.

Ken's Racism

I read recently of a white man named Ken who expressed deep concern that his one-year old daughter had developed an attachment to African American dolls. Ken worried about raising his daughter in an atmosphere free of the "smog" of blackness that he believes has become pervasive in our culture.

He says that he wants to protect his daughter from the black racism such as characterized the Waukesha massacre and the Brooklyn subway shooting.

I think Ken sounds like a racist, but maybe I don't understand racism. I read another article recently in which another father experienced very similar concerns with his daughter, but apparently this father is not a racist because he's an "antiracist."

The major difference is that Ken is white, but the other father is black, and the races of the dolls was different:

Self-described “anti-racist scholar” and author Ibram X. Kendi reportedly grew concerned about white supremacy when he noticed his daughter developed “an attachment” to a white doll, according to a column from the Los Angeles Times.

Kendi is slated to release a new book in mid-June titled “How to Raise an Antiracist,” according to the publisher Penguin Random House. A Los Angeles Times columnist reported that in the book, Kendi claims he began thinking about white supremacy and kids after his one-year-old daughter took a liking to a blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll.

“[Kendi] began to think about what it would take to help [his daughter] grow up without the pervasive ‘smog’ of white supremacy surrounding her,” the column reads.

The Los Angeles Times columnist proceeded to tie Kendi’s new book on raising anti-racist kids to the Buffalo shooting committed by an 18-year-old inspired by racism.

It seems that whether a set of attitudes is racist or not depends on the race of the person who holds them and not on the attitudes themselves. That's a very interesting cultural strategy, I suppose, but it is itself obviously racist.

Postscript: Ken is fictional. Does that make a difference?

The Evolving Acceptance of ID

Granville Sewell Professor of mathematics at the University of Texas El Paso argues in a pair of essays in The Federalist that the scientific establishment is slowly realizing it can no longer maintain the pretense that Intelligent Design lacks scientific merit and continue to exclude it from the scientific community.

Theorizing in science, like theorizing in other disciplines, often employs a method known as inference to the best explanation in which the theorist asks, given the empirical data, which of several competing hypotheses best explains what we see? The criteria for a "best explanation" are several, and include simplicity, adequacy, fruitfulness, testability, etc.

There are essentially two live options to choose between when it comes to the origins of life and the cosmos. These phenomena are the result of either the purposeful creative activity of an intelligent mind (Intelligent Design) or the product of mindless, random forces (naturalism).

Sewell limits his discussion to the origin of life, the origin of advanced life forms, and the origin of human consciousness and maintains that in each case naturalism is hopelessly inadequate as an explanation. We never see unintelligent forces producing massive amounts of information, such as is necessary to construct and operate the first living cell, but we see minds do this sort of thing all the time.

To read the details of his arguments check out his article, which isn't long, at the link. He summarizes it with this statement:

The argument for intelligent design could not be simpler or clearer: Unintelligent forces alone cannot rearrange atoms into computers and airplanes and nuclear power plants and smartphones, and any attempt to explain how they can must fail somewhere because they obviously can’t. Perhaps this is the best way to understand why explanations without design will never work, and why science may finally be starting to recognize this.

An example of how science is beginning to recognize the cogency of the ID arguments is the theme of his second article.

He discusses a scientific conference he attended in Israel on the topic of the potential and limitations of evolutionary processes to generate living things. The conference organizers invited numerous prominent evolutionary biologists, but also invited four or five scientists who are proponents of intelligent design. It's hard to imagine ID proponents being invited to speak at such an event even a decade ago.

Sewell writes:

Most, but not all [of the ID speakers], avoided mentioning design explicitly, but still emphasized the “limitations” of evolutionary processes.

Even Rice University chemist James Tour (who considers himself “agnostic” toward intelligent design) argued that origin-of-life researchers have deceived the public into believing that we are close to understanding how life formed, when we are not.

As stated on the conference web page, “the main goal of this unique interdisciplinary, international conference is to bring together scientists and scholars who hold a range of views on the potential and possible limitations of chemical and biological processes in evolution.”

The organizers attempted, to a large degree successfully, to create an atmosphere of mutual respect between those who emphasized the “potential” of evolutionary processes, and those who emphasized their “limitations.”

Until recently, intelligent design has been considered an untouchable topic in mainstream scientific circles, where it’s considered axiomatic that everything must be explainable in terms of the unintelligent forces of nature, no matter how implausible and incomplete our current explanations may be.

This axiom has worked well in other areas of science, but the problems of explaining the origin and evolution of life without design are inherently much more difficult than other scientific problems.

For this reason, a growing number of scientists seem finally ready to at least include intelligent design within the “range of views” allowed to be heard. The meeting in Israel represented an important step in this direction and shows that mainstream science can ignore the obvious for a long time, but not forever.

If you need further evidence that intelligent design is finally being taken more seriously, look at the long list of distinguished scientists endorsing Stephen Meyer’s 2021 book “Return of the God Hypothesis.” Physics Nobel prize winner Brian Josephson said the book “makes it clear that far from being an unscientific claim, intelligent design is valid science.”

Another endorser is Brazilian chemist Marcos Eberlin, whose own book “Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose,” which promotes intelligent design, carries the endorsements of three Nobel prize winners.

We're in the midst of a scientific revolution. Thinking on the origin and structure of the universe, life, and consciousness is "evolving" as more and more scientists recognize the power of ID to explain what naturalism simply cannot, or at least cannot explain in a plausible manner.

It'll be fascinating to see how this revolution unfolds over the next decade or so.

Male Pregnancy and Other Lunacies

Surely a significant portion of our intelligentsia is in the grip of some form of insanity. What other conclusion can be drawn from watching a clip from a recent congressional hearing in which Aimee Arrambide, the director of a pro-abortion non-profit organization called AVOW, is questioned by Republican North Carolina Rep. Dan Bishop.

Bishop asks Arrambide how she defines a woman, to which Arrambide replies, “I believe that everyone can identify for themselves.” Bishop follows up with, “Ok. Do you believe then that men can become pregnant and have abortions?”

Arrambide's response was, “Yes.”

Q: "Do you believe that men can become pregnant and have abortions?" -@RepDanBishop

A: "Yes." -Democrat witness pic.twitter.com/TfxboajSJU

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) May 18, 2022

These are folks who in other contexts would boast about "following the science," but what science is there to support Arrambide's belief that men can become pregnant and have abortions?

It would've been interesting had Bishop asked her exactly what happens in a man's body when he conceives a child. How does the conception occur, what tissue does the conceptus implant upon, what physiological changes does the man's body undergo during the pregnancy?

Perhaps Ms. Arrambide would've given the Ketanji Brown Jackson "I'm not a biologist" reply. Jackson, a pending Supreme Court Justice no less, demurred when asked in a senate hearing to define "woman" by implying that only a biologist could make such a determination.

It's astonishing that we've come to the point in our national descent into madness that educated people actually believe that men can get pregnant, that we can't define what it is to be an adult female, or, for that matter, that we can't tell that what a pregnant woman (or man) is carrying in the womb is a human being .

It seems that one prerequisite to being a modern progressive is that you have to be deeply prone to a wide variety of delusions.

In the same congressional hearing which featured Ms. Arrambide's stunner, Rep. Bishop had also asked reproductive healthcare specialist Dr. Yashica Robinson, who uses “she/her” pronouns, if she could define what a “woman” was.

You can read the circumlocution that passed for Dr. Robinson's response at the link.

Subsequently, the Daily Caller took it upon themselves to conduct a poll of our august senatorial leaders, America's "best and brightest." They reached out,

to every Senate Democrat to see if any of our leaders would provide a definition. Each request was met with silence. Only 15 Republican Senators were willing to provide a definition of what a “woman” is when questioned by the Caller.

I don't know why this should be so hard or why one needs to be a professional biologist to ascertain whether an individual is a man or a woman. In probably 95% or more of the cases all one need do is "look under the hood," so to speak. In cases where such an inspection may fail to give an unambiguous result, an abdominal MRI or a simple genetic test would settle the matter.

If there's a uterus or a prostate present, that would seem to be dispositive, as would an XX or XY genotype.

But, someone might object, what if a person who's anatomically, physiologically and genetically male really thinks he's a female. Doesn't a person's psychology trump their biology?

The short answer to that question is, why should it? Why should one's psychology be privileged over one's biology? How does thinking something is the case make it objectively the case?

Abraham Lincoln was once confronted with that question in a different context. He responded with a question of his own. He asked, "If you called a dog's tail a leg how many legs would it have?" "Well, it'd have five legs," his interlocutor answered. To which Lincoln replied, "No sir, it'd have four legs. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one."

Admit it, You're a Racist

Are you a white supremacist? According to something called the white supremacy pyramid employed by some "anti-racist" speakers you really can't help but be. Note that the pyramid is divided into examples of "Overt White Supremacy" and "Covert White Supremacy."

According to "anti-racists" white supremacy, whether overt or covert, is an expression of racism so if any of the views or opinions anywhere on this pyramid describe you, you are a racist white supremacist.

No one would disagree, of course, with those attitudes depicted as overt white supremacy. They're all harmful and most of them are evil and deserve condemnation. The problem for the anti-racist crowd is that they're so rare that if they were the only manifestations of racism in this country it'd have to be acknowledged that America had pretty much resolved its racial problem.

To avoid thinking that the problem has been largely resolved, to keep racial animus alive and perpetuate the idea that white America still owes black America, the anti-racists espy covert racism almost everywhere. This, we're assured, is the real racism that saturates American life and with which black people have to deal every day.

Here's the pyramid:

It's hard to know exactly what some of these things mean, but in any case notice that,

• if you try to look past a person's race (colorblindness) and treat everyone as a human being and child of God, you're a racist. By this measure embracing Martin Luther King's dream of a day when his children would be judged by their character and not their skin color is racist, and so was King for dreaming it.
• if you believe that our culture was derived primarily from the intellectual resources we inherited from Europe and that this inheritance has made this country the freest, most prosperous country in history and that this heritage should be taught to our children, you're a racist.
• if you were, or are, a Trump supporter who believes that America has wandered away from the institutions and values - like strong two-parent families, Judeo-Christian morality, the belief that hard work tends to be rewarded - that make a nation strong and resilient, you're a racist.
• if you believe that all lives are equally valuable in the eyes of God, you're a racist. But if you believe that God values some lives, based on race, more highly than others then you're also a racist.
• if you believe that many blacks need white help (paternalism) either through transfer payments, donations, affirmative action, or other kinds of support in order to help them become self-reliant, you're a racist. But if you believe blacks shouldn't be given this kind of support you're also a racist.
• if you adopt for yourself aspects of what might be called "black culture" (cultural appropriation) you're a racist. This only works one way, though, since virtually everything that blacks use, enjoy and benefit from throughout their lives is a product of white "European" culture. Of course, if you were to refuse to adopt or appreciate something because its a product of black culture, that, too, would be racist.
• if you believe that we should control our borders and regulate who immigrates into the country, you're a racist.
• if you believe you're not a racist then you are a racist, and if you believe you are a racist then, of course, you are a racist.
• if you believe that black people can be as racist as anyone else then you're a racist. If, on the other hand, you believe that black people cannot be racist then you believe they're morally superior to every other race and that's also racist.

In other words, no matter how hard you may try to expunge your soul of the ugly stain of racism, if you're white it's ineradicable and the purging project is hopeless. But if that's the case where does it lead?

If whites cannot help but be racist might not a lot of them conclude that if no matter what they do they're going to be hectored about their white privilege, their white supremacy and their intrinsic moral failure, they may as well stop trying to treat everyone equally and just stick to people like themselves, racially balkanize, resegregate, and let each race take care of their own?

Resegregation might make the anti-racist crowd happy for a while, but it certainly wouldn't work out to the well-being of the vast majority of blacks who've benefited from having integrated into white society.

I guess to think that, though, is paternalism, and that, according to the pyramid, is also racist.

Why Gas Prices Are High

In a recent column at National Review Jim Geraghty explains a matter that's no doubt of interest to everyone.

His topic is why fuel prices in general, and diesel prices in particular, are rising to record levels. Contrary to allegations from Mr. Biden, Senator Warren and others, it's not because oil companies are too greedy. It's because, Geraghty tells us, six U.S. oil refineries have shut down and a seventh is slated to close. Meanwhile, there are no new refineries on the horizon.

The lack of refining capacity has exerted upward pressure on all fuel costs, but the soaring cost of diesel is particularly alarming. Geraghty writes:

As of this morning, the national average cost of a gallon of diesel fuel is $5.57 — which is the record high, according to the American Automobile Association. A year ago, it was $3.17 per gallon. (The national average cost of a gallon of regular gasoline this morning is $4.52; one year ago, the cost was $3.04.)

We are now reaching the point where the cost of diesel fuel is making some goods too expensive to transport. One trucker told the Orlando Fox affiliate yesterday that, “The cost of diesel is single-handedly taking us out of the game one by one no matter how big you are. . . . If you’re getting paid $2 per mile you’re not taking that load no matter if it is baby formula or orange juice because the cost of diesel is $5 plus. You just can’t take that load.”

Why is there a dearth of refineries? Geraghty explains:

Back in 2020, U.S. oil-refinery capacity peaked at 19 million barrels per day, according to the EIA. But because of the pandemic, and the delayed decision to permanently shut down the Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) refinery after a major accident in 2019, U.S. refinery capacity declined significantly during that year. (PES was the largest oil refinery on the East Coast and refined 335,000 barrels per day.)

In addition to the PES refinery, five more shut down over the course of 2020: the Shell refinery in Convent, La., the Tesoro Marathon refinery in Martinez, Calif., the HollyFrontier refinery in Cheyenne, Wyo., the Western Refining refinery in Gallup, N.M., and the Dakota Prairie refinery in Dickinson, N.D. Those six collectively refined more than 1 million barrels of oil per day.

Thus, the U.S. started 2021 with its lowest annual refining capacity in six years, and that capacity did not expand significantly over the rest of the year. And as the pandemic’s effects on American life faded, month by month, demand for fuel increased — not just from drivers but from trucking and shipping companies, construction companies — remember, 98 percent of all energy use in the construction sector comes from diesel — and from airlines and other consumers of jet fuel.

Why are we experiencing these stunning fuel prices? Because we’re getting back to pre-pandemic levels of demand, while our refineries are pumping out about a million fewer gallons of fuel per day than they did before the pandemic. And you know what happens when you mix lower supply with higher demand.

Nor can those closed refineries simply be reopened:

The former PES refinery complex in Philadelphia is being demolished. The Shell refinery is slated to become an “alternative fuels complex,” and it’s a similar transition for the Tesoro refinery.

The HollyFrontier refinery is already converted to processing biofuels, as is the Dakota Prairie refinery. (Certain environmentalists will denounce the greedy oil companies and praise the companies producing environmentally friendly biofuels, never stopping to check and realize that many of them are the same companies.)

Wait, I haven’t even gotten to the bad news: Chemical maker Lyondell Basell Industries announced in April that the company will permanently close its Houston crude-oil refinery by the end of 2023. That plant refines about 263,000 barrels of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel per day.

The petroleum industry read the handwriting on the political wall, saw that there's no future in fossil fuels given the current hostility toward them, and begun the process of transitioning out of them.

But when diesel gets prohibitively expensive, industries that rely on it will begin to cut back or shut down. Farming, construction, airlines, and, of course, trucking will all find it financially impossible to stay in business at the level necessary to keep our economy humming.

Most of the products in our homes are petroleum-based so they'll all become more costly.

A declining refining capacity and the concommitant rise in the cost of diesel and jet fuel will ultimately lead to higher unemployment, empty store shelves, more difficult and frustrating air travel and almost surely a recession, if not another Great Depression.

Read Geraghty's column for more insight into this very troubling predicament.

Oz on Islamophobia

As I write this the Pennsylvania primary election campaign is over, although it's still unclear whether Mehmet Oz, Dave McCormick or Kathy Barnette will be the Republican nominee to run next November for the seat being vacated by retiring U.S. Senator Pat Toomey (R. PA).

Even so, I thought an article by Robert Spencer at PJ Media on a criticism by Oz of something Barnette tweeted in 2015 was worth highlighting.

Apparently, Barnette tweeted that “Pedophilia is a Cornerstone of Islam,” a tweet that evidently deeply offended Dr. Oz. He has accused her of Islamophobia, and she now claims - incongruously, since she offers no explanation how the words appear on her Twitter feed - that she “would never have said that.”

Spencer notes, though, that what Oz alleges that she said is not unreasonable and that she would have been better off just owning the remark and defending it, as there is certainly ample justification in Islam for thinking it. He goes on to explain:

Turkey’s directorate of religious affairs (Diyanet) said in January 2018 that under Islamic law, girls as young as nine can marry. Ishaq Akintola, professor of Islamic Eschatology and Director of Muslim Rights Concern, Nigeria, said in 2016: “Islam has no age barrier in marriage and Muslims have no apology for those who refuse to accept this.”

Dr. Abd Al-Hamid Al-‘Ubeidi, Iraqi expert on Islamic law, said in 2008: “There is no minimum marriage age for either men or women in Islamic law. The law in many countries permits girls to marry only from the age of 18. This is arbitrary legislation, not Islamic law.”

Dr. Salih bin Fawzan, prominent cleric and member of Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, declared in 2014 that there is no minimum age for marriage in Islamic law at all and that girls can be married “even if they are in the cradle.” Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology has ruled that “Islam does not forbid marriage of young children.”

These authorities say these things because hadiths that Muslims consider [to be an] authentic record state that Muhammad’s favorite wife, Aisha, was six when Muhammad wedded her and nine when he consummated the marriage: “The Prophet wrote the (marriage contract) with Aisha while she was six years old and consummated his marriage with her while she was nine years old and she remained with him for nine years (i.e. till his death)” (Bukhari 7.62.88).

This doesn’t mean that all Muslims are pedophiles or approve of pedophilia, but it does mean that what Barnette wrote was not unreasonable.

Spencer links to all of the relevant sources in his article, but Oz thinks Barnette should be banned from the race for tweeting something defamatory to an entire religion. Yet, if her allegation is true how is it defamatory?

The question is, is it true? Does Islamic law actually permit adult men to marry and subsequently engage in conjugal acts with children or doesn't it? If it does, then Barnette's tweet certainly seems justified, unless we're so politically correct nowadays that the only religion we can say anything negative about with impunity is Christianity.

Speaking of which, a number of prominent atheists have written scathingly about what they believe are the shortcomings of Christianity. For example, Brits like Richard Dawkins, an Oxford professor and the late Christopher Hitchens, a world renowned journalist, grew wealthy on the proceeds of their best-selling anti-Christian books The God Delusion and God Is Not Great.

Spencer wonders whether Oz would think, had any of these men taken out dual citizenship and run for a Senate seat in the U.S., that their attacks on Christianity, the bulk of which have in fact been debunked, would disqualify them from office.

It's a fair question.

An Inept Response to Inflation

President Biden recently alleged that there wasn't much he could do about inflation since the problem is due to factors beyond his control (Putin's war, supply chain problems, Covid, etc.). Well, according to The Federalist's Christopher Jacobs, that's just not true.

Jacobs writes that there are two things the Biden administration could do that would help to reduce inflation.

The first is repeal the $1.9 trillion "Covid stimulus." Jacobs notes that,

Press reports have listed some of the many wasteful projects that governments funded using the $1.9 trillion “stimulus” measure Democrats passed last March under the guise of “Covid relief.” The extravagant pork-barrel spending goes from coast to coast, from irrigation systems at a golf club in Colorado Springs to upgrades to a minor league baseball park in New York.

But the Congressional Budget Office notes that chunks of that spending have yet to go out the door. CBO estimates the bill will increase the deficit by $529 billion in the current fiscal year (which ends September 30), $114 billion in the upcoming fiscal year (which begins on October 1), and $59 billion in the fiscal year after that.

In his speech, Biden said that “reducing the deficit is one of the main ways we can reduce inflationary pressures.” Repealing last year’s “stimulus,” and rescinding any amounts not already obligated, would do just that.

The second thing the President could do would be to encourage more oil and natural gas production. This would bring down the cost of almost everything and have an almost immediate effect:

In his speech, Biden also claimed Republicans “have no plan to bring down energy prices today.” That claim is false.

Republicans have proposed numerous ideas to would bring down energy prices....Because oil and natural gas operate in “spot” markets, any announcements signaling an expansion of American energy would bring down prices almost immediately, well before any new oil or gas wells come online.

But leftist climate warriors don’t want to increase energy exploration activities, which explains why the Biden administration recently canceled oil and gas sales in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.

Inflation hits everyone, but it crushes those who live on the margin. The Democrats say they care about the poor, but they're refusing opportunities to demonstrate the sincerity of that concern because they don't want to stop the pork train or put on hold their plans to destroy the fossil fuel industry.

Meanwhile, all Americans are paying for their fecklessness, and the poor are suffering most of all.