How Did This Ever Evolve?

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

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

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

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

On Fathers' Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Red Flag Difficulties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consider what's called the "boyfriend loophole."

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

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

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

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

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

Progressives' Internecine Warfare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grim cites one explanation for this dysfunction:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'll close with this passage:

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

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

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

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

Is Wokeism in Retreat?

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

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

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

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

But now look where we are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disagreement by Death Threat

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

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

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

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

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

During my own transition, I had seven surgeries.

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

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

Here's the video excerpt:

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

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

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

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

Alarming Poll

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

Here's a chart that summarizes the findings:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Camus, Sartre and Theistic Conversion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the link:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nevertheless, the evidence in both cases is suggestive.

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

If the quote is accurate it may also be prescient.

The Left's Resort to Violence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Justice notes that,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biden's Team

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hanson concludes with these words:

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

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

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

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

Two Political Disadvantages

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

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

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

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

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

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

His next point is also noteworthy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Born That Way

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

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

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

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

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

Kaufmann's findings point to,

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

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

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

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

Nature's Light Bulb

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summer Reading

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

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

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

Thanks, and best wishes for a great summer.

Hanson's Trumpology

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

Here are some excerpts from his column:

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

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

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

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

So, will Trump run?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps, but, Hanson writes,

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

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

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

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

Hanson adds some interesting predictions about the Democratic 2024 field:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.