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Sirens rang in Jerusalem as air defense systems shot down missiles over the city early yesterday morning. After Iran launched more than three hundred missiles and drones at Israel, here’s what we know today:

• The strikes caused only minor damage to one Israeli military base.
• Israel’s chief military spokesman said nearly 99 percent of the aerial threats were intercepted. The US said it helped shoot down dozens of drones and missiles.
• Leaders of the Group of Seven nations stated yesterday that they “unequivocally condemn in the strongest terms Iran’s direct and unprecedented attack against Israel.”
• Israel vowed to “exact a price,” but an Israeli war cabinet meeting ended last night without a decision on how Israel will respond.
• Iran’s top military officer said “there is no intention to continue” its offensive, but added that if Israel attacked Iran, “our next operation will be much bigger than this.”

While the attack itself was not devastating, the New York Times reports that it “opened a volatile new chapter in the long-running shadow war between Iran and Israel.”

Iran is about seventy-five times larger than the Jewish state; its population is nearly ten times larger. The two countries are more than a thousand miles apart. Israel has no intention of occupying Iranian land or subjugating its people.

Why, then, is Iran at war with Israel?

And why is this question so significant for America and the global future?

There was a time when Iran and Israel were not enemies but allies. When Israel declared its independence in 1948, Iran was one of the first Muslim countries to recognize the new state. However, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ousted Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in the 1979 Islamic revolution, he severed all diplomatic and commercial ties with Israel.

Khomeini’s goals from the inception of the revolution were to liberate Iranians from “the evils of Western imperialism” and to export his version of political Islam. Over the years, Iran built what it calls an “axis of resistance” that includes Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Syrian regime and Shia militias in Syria, Houthi rebels in Yemen, militias in Iraq, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank.

 We are seeing a “priesthood” of this kind now in our own backyard, teaching the “evils of Western imperialism” to the youth of our own country. How long before this new secular religion, gets a dynamic and charismatic religious leader that tells them all they want to hear. I believe it will not be Christian, that’s so “colonial” sic. But it will be a religious leader that shakes off the “shackles” of Christianity and its outdated “sins.” There will be new sins, and they are already named and have all the same powers over life and new freedoms if you want to call them that. What you can eat, what you can wear, the kind of books you can read, the kind of music and entertainment that is “acceptable;” what kind of car or appliances. There is even a new “Leper” that is untouchable and “unclean.”

Across the years, Iran has waged war on Israel through these proxies. Now it has launched an unprecedented direct attack on Israel from Iran itself. One reason is that Iran is 90% Shia Muslim while the so-called Palestinians are almost 100% Sunnis. They were and are literally at each other’s throats for their entire history, but without the common cause of killing all Jews. Iran seems more than happy to sacrifice Sunnis for the cause.

Americans remember Ayatollah Khomeini because of the Iranian hostage crisis caused by another weak American government of the time, that ensued shortly after he came to power and are familiar with his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but most do not know the person who prepared the way for this revolution.

Ali Shariati was a Western-educated (only we teach things against our own way for life in the history of the world) intellectual who was inspired by Marxist anti-colonialist scholars (name me on single government that didn’t begin as a “colony/colonizer”). He divided the world into the oppressed (including Iran) and the oppressors (primarily the West) and framed a revolutionary ideology to oust the monarchy and “liberate” Iranians. He died before the 1979 revolution, but Khomeini capitalized on the popularity of his ideas.

From then to now, Iran’s leaders have sought to export this linkage of Marxist “liberation” with radicalized Islam. Since Israel and the US are the primary obstacles to this vision, Khomeini termed them the “little Satan” and the “great Satan,” respectively.

Add the eschatological conviction of Iran’s leaders that the Mahdi, their version of the Messiah, will appear to dominate the world for Islam only after the Muslim world destroys Israel, and you can see why Iran’s unprecedented escalation against Israel over the weekend is significant.

 They are not only Politically aligned against us, but fanatic religious zealots living within a theocracy, that are committed to our destruction as a society. Not much there to work with as far as agreement.

“So we remain in darkness”

This conflict is not just military but spiritual. Iran’s leaders are being used by the evil one who “comes only to steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10) as they strive to enact their deluded vision of the future through violent means. Jesus’ description fits them well:

This is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come into the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God (John 3:19–21).

This temptation to choose self-dependent darkness over Spirit-dependent light is not limited to Iran. Henri Nouwen commented:

Jesus sees the evil in this world as a lack of trust in God’s love. He makes us see that we persistently fall back on ourselves, rely more on ourselves than on God, and are inclined more to love of self than to love of God. So we remain in darkness. If we walk in the light, then we are enabled to acknowledge that everything good, beautiful, and true comes from God and is offered to us in love.

Now it falls to you and me to “walk in the light” and to share it as urgently as we can:

According to Foreign Policy, the Institute for Science and International Security currently assesses Iran’s breakout time—the period necessary for Iran to assemble a nuclear weapon—at zero. This means that Iran has enough weapons-grade uranium to build a bomb within days and enough to assemble six weapons within thirty days.

Iran is already successfully weaponizing proxies to fight Israel on its behalf, encircling the besieged nation with terrorist groups Hezbollah in the north, Hamas in the west, Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the east, the Houthis in the south, and militias in Syria and Iraq in the northeast.

The irony that must not be lost, is that Iran, which is Shiite and Persian, is using Arabs, many of whom are Sunni, to do its bidding. As one commentator notes, “Attacking Iran’s proxies in the region has . . . been largely ineffective, given the regime’s indifference to Arabs martyring themselves for its cause.” They really don’t care about ethnic Arab Sunni Muslims. It would be like Methodists not caring about Baptist’s who martyr themselves for the faith and keep sending out the Baptist’s.

But Iran’s reach transcends the Middle East. Tehran is now aligned directly with Russia and China, delivering more than two thousand drones to aid Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and exporting vast oil shipments to aid the Chinese government. It joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in July 2023, further solidifying its economic and defense alliance with the two.

Iran’s multipolar strategy is working.

A bipartisan letter sent earlier this year by over a dozen senators noted that, despite US sanctions, “Iran is now exporting on average more than 1.4 million barrels of crude oil per day,” two-thirds of it to China. The letter adds that because of illicit oil exports and pervasive sanctions evasion, Iran’s economy is growing by 4 percent annually and its foreign currency reserves increased by 45 percent from 2021 to 2023. The sanctions are a joke!

In the meantime, Hamas’s strategy of sacrificing Palestinian civilians to shelter its troops is working as well. As civilian casualties in Gaza have tragically but predictably climbed, support for Israel in the West has fallen. Americans’ support for Israel’s military actions has declined from 50 percent in November 2023 to only 36 percent today. Support for Israel among young evangelicals in the US has plummeted by more than 50 percent in just three years.

All this raises the pressing question: now that Iran has attacked Israel, how will Americans respond?

The following essay is adapted from the author’s new book, Pagan America: The Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come.

It’s hard to survey the state of our country and not conclude that something is very wrong in America. I don’t just mean with our economy or the border or rampant crime in our cities, but with our basic grasp on reality itself.

Our cultural and political elite now insist that men can become women, and vice versa, and that even children can consent to what they euphemistically call “gender-affirming care.” In a perfect inversion of reason and common sense, some Democratic lawmakers now want laws on the books forcing parents to affirm their child’s “gender identity” on the pain of having the child taken from them by the state for abuse.

Abortion, which was once reluctantly defended only on the basis that it should be “safe, legal, and rare,” is now championed as a positive good, even at later stages of pregnancy. Abortion advocates now insist the only difference between an unborn child with rights and one without them is the mother’s desire, or not, to carry the pregnancy to term.

But even less contentious issues are now up for grabs, like mass rape. After Hamas terrorists filmed themselves raping and murdering Israeli women on Oct. 7, boasting about their savagery to a watching world, vast swaths of the America left still cannot bring themselves to condemn Hamas. The same progressive college students who insist that the mere presence of a conservative speaker on campus makes them “unsafe” are unable to condemn one of the worst instances of mass rape in modern history. Some even declare openly that they stand in solidarity with the Hamas rapists.

Pagan America

What is happening? Put bluntly, America is becoming pagan. That doesn’t necessarily mean a sudden surge in people worshipping Zeus or Apollo (although modern forms of witchcraft are on the rise). Rather it means an embrace of a fundamentally pagan worldview that rejects both transcendent moral truth and objective reality, and insists instead that truth is relative and reality is what we will it to be.

Recall that ancient pagans ascribed sacred or divine status to the here and now, to things or activities, even to human beings if they were powerful enough (like a pharaoh or a Roman emperor). They rejected the notion of an omnipotent, transcendent God — and all that the existence of God would imply. Hasan i-Sabbah, the ninth-century Arab warlord whose group gave us the word “assassins,” summed up the pagan ethos in his famous last words: Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

In other words, the radical moral relativism we see everywhere today represents a thoroughly post-Christian worldview that is best understood as the return of paganism, which, as the Romans well understood, is fundamentally incompatible with the Christian faith. Christianity after all does not allow for such relativism but insists on hard definitions of truth and what is — and is not — sacred and divine.  

So if we have entered a post-Christian era in the West and are facing a return, in modern guises, of paganism, what does that mean for America? It means the end of America as we know it, and the emergence of something new and terrifying in its place. 

America was founded not just on certain ideals but on a certain kind of people, a predominantly Christian people, and it depends for its survival on their moral virtue, without which the entire experiment in self-government will unravel. As Christianity fades in America, so too will our system of government, our civil society, and all our rights and freedoms. Without a national culture shaped by the Christian faith, without a majority consensus in favor of traditional Christian morality, America as we know it will come to an end. Instead of free citizens in a republic, we will be slaves in a pagan empire.

Perhaps that sounds dramatic, but it is true nevertheless. There is no secular utopia waiting for us in the post-Christian, neopagan world now coming into being — no future in which we get to retain the advantages and benefits of Christendom without the faith from which they sprang. Western civilization and its accoutrements depend on Christianity, not just in the abstract but in practice. Liberalism relies on a source of vitality that does not originate from it and that it cannot replenish. That source is the Christian faith, in the absence of which we will revert to an older form of civilization, one in which power alone matters and the weak and the vulnerable count for nothing.

What awaits us on the other side of Christendom, in other words, is a pagan dark age. Here, in the third decade of the 21st century, we can say with some confidence that this dark age has begun.

T. S. Eliot made this point in a series of lectures he gave at Cambridge University in 1939 that would later be published as The Idea of a Christian Society. Eliot wrote, “[T]he choice before us is the creation of a new Christian culture, and the acceptance of a pagan one.” Writing on the eve of the Second World War, Eliot said, “To speak of ourselves as a Christian Society, in contrast to that of [National Socialist] Germany or [Communist] Russia, is an abuse of terms. We mean only that we have a society in which no one is penalised for the formal profession of Christianity; but we conceal from ourselves the unpleasant knowledge of the real values by which we live.” 

Those values, Eliot argued, did not belong to Christianity but to “modern paganism,” which he believed was ascendent in both Western democracies and totalitarian states alike. Western democracies held no positive principles aside from liberalism and tolerance, he argued. The result was a negative culture, lacking substance, that would eventually dissolve and be replaced by a pagan culture that espoused materialism, secularism, and moral relativism as positive principles. These principles would be enforced as a public or state morality, and those who dissented from them would be punished. 

Paganism, as Eliot saw it and as I argue in my new book, Pagan America, imposes a moral relativism in which power alone determines right. The principles Americans have always asserted against this kind of moral and political tyranny — freedom of speech, equal protection under the law, government by consent of the governed — depend for their sustenance on the Christian faith, alive and active among the people, shaping their private and family lives as much as the social and political life of the nation.

Dechristianization in America, then, heralds the end of all that once held it together and made it cohere. And the process of dechristianization is further along than most people realize, partly because it has been underway in the West for centuries, and in America since at least the middle of the last century. Only now, in our time, are the outlines of a post-Christian society coming clearly into view. 

What does it mean for America to be post-Christian? To be pagan? What will such a country be like? We don’t have to wait to find out because the pagan era has arrived. If we look closely and consider the evidence honestly, we can already see what kind of a place it will be. Put bluntly, America without Christianity will not be the sort of place where most Americans will want to live, Christian or not. The classical liberal order, so long protected and preserved by the Christian civilization from which it sprang, is already being systematically destroyed and replaced with something new.

This new society — call it pagan America — will be marked above all by oppression and violence, primarily against the weak and powerless, perpetrated by the wealthy and powerful. In pagan America, such violence will be officially sanctioned and carry the force of law. We will have a public or state morality, just as Rome had, which will be quite separate from whatever religion one happens to profess. It was, after all, Christianity that united morality and religion, and without it, they will be separated once more. What you believe won’t really matter to the state; what will matter is whether you adhere to the public morality — whether you offer the mandatory sacrifice to Caesar, so to speak. And if you don’t, there will be consequences.

We are not talking about the imminent return of pre-Christian polytheism as the state religion. The new paganism will not necessarily come with the outward trappings of the old, but it will be no less pagan for all that. It will be defined, as it always was, by the belief that nothing is true, everything is permitted. And that belief will produce, as it always has, a world defined almost entirely by power: the strong subjugating or discarding the weak, and the weak doing what they must to survive. That’s why nearly all pagan civilizations, especially the most “advanced” ones, were slave empires. The more advanced they were, the more brutal and violent they became.

The same thing will eventually happen in our time. The lionization of abortion, the rise of transgenderism, the normalization of euthanasia, the destruction of the family, the sexualization of children and mainstreaming of pedophilia, and the emergence of a materialist supernaturalism as a substitute for traditional religion are all happening right now as a result of Christianity’s decline.

We should understand all of these things as signs of paganism’s return, remembering that paganism was not just the ritual embodiment of sincere religious belief but an entire sociopolitical order. The mystery cults of pagan Rome and Babylon were not just theatrical or fanciful expressions of polytheistic urges in the populace, they were mechanisms of social control.

There was of course spiritual — demonic —power behind the pagan gods, but also real political power behind the pagan order. This order achieved its fullest expression in Rome, which eventually elevated emperors to the status of deities, embracing the diabolical idea that man himself creates the gods and therefore can become one. It is no accident that the worship of the Roman emperor as a god emerged at more or less the exact same historical moment as the Incarnation. Christianity, which proclaimed that God had become man, burst forth into a social world that was everywhere adopting the worship of a man-god, and its coming heralded the end of that world. 

The new paganism will likewise bring an entire sociopolitical order with its own mechanisms of amassing power and exerting social and political control. We can see these mechanisms at work everywhere today, from the therapeutic narcissism of social media to the spread of transgender and even transhumanist ideologies pushed by powerful corporations working in concert with the state.

We see it in the emergence of new technologies, above all artificial intelligence, whose architects talk openly in pagan terms about “creating the gods” and imbuing them with immense new powers over every aspect of our lives. The old gods are indeed returning, only we do not call them that because Christianity has made it impossible. Perhaps as the Christian faith subsides they will be called gods once more. 

But whatever we call them, the sociopolitical order they bring will not be liberal or tolerant. It will not be secular humanism divorced from the Christian morality that made humanism possible. All of that will be swept away, replaced by an oppressive and violent sociopolitical order predicated on raw power, not principle. The violence will be official — carried out by government bureaucrats, police, heath care workers, NGOs, public schools, and Big Tech. 

This is predictable, and was indeed predicted a long time ago. Edmund Burke said that if the Christian religion, “which has hitherto been our boast and comfort, and one great source of civilization,” were somehow overthrown, the void would be filled by “some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading superstition.” He was right. The prevalence of degrading superstition and the disfigurement of reason are hallmarks of the new pagan order, and today are everywhere visible in American society. 

We were warned about all this, warned that our survival as a free people depended on preserving the faith of our fathers. President Calvin Coolidge, speaking on the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, called it “the product of the spiritual insight of the people.” America in 1926 was booming in every way, with great leaps forward not just in economic prosperity, but in science and technology. But all these material things, said Coolidge, came from the Declaration. “The things of the spirit come first,” he said, and then leveled a stark warning to his countrymen:

Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped.

Nearly a century later, it’s clear we have failed to cultivate the reverence our fathers had for the things that are holy, and we have indeed sunk into a pagan materialism. What comes next is pagan slavery, which now looms over the republic like a great storm cloud, ready to break.

No Fear

When it breaks and the deluge comes, though, Christians at least need not fear. Christ Himself came into a pagan world that regarded His message with contempt and incomprehension. His followers endured centuries of persecution and martyrdom, and in those fires, a faith was forged that would topple the greatest pagan empire ever known, and amid its ruins build something greater yet.

In a television address in 1974, the Venerable Fulton J. Sheen, then nearly 80 years old, declared, “We are at the end of Christendom.” He defined Christendom as “economic, political, social life, as inspired by Christian principles. That is ending — we have seen it die. Look at the symptoms: the breakup of the family, divorce, abortion, immorality, general dishonesty. We live in it from day to day, and we do not see the decline.”

Half a century has passed since Sheen said this, which might not be long in the lifespan of a religion founded 2,000 years ago, but then it only takes the lifespan of a single generation for much to be lost. And much has been lost in the last half-century. The symptoms are much worse today than they were in 1974, in ways that Sheen himself might not have foreseen. But he was right that it’s hard to see the decline when you live in it day to day and hard to see where it’s heading.

The task for Americans today, Christian and non-Christian alike, is to see the decline, understand what it portends, and prepare accordingly. This is not a counsel of despair. For Christians familiar with their own history, nothing is ever really cause for despair — not even the loss, if it comes to that, of the American republic. History, as J. R. R. Tolkien said in one of his letters, is for Christians a “long defeat — though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.”

What he meant by this, in part, is that we cannot in the end vanquish or eradicate evil. Our world, like Tolkien’s Middle Earth, is a world in decline, marred by sin and corruption, embroiled in a rebellion against God. But as Christians, we repose our hope in a God who can, and indeed already has, conquered sin and death. So we await the dawn, and in the meantime, we fight the long defeat

Article by: Kurt Schlichter

The left is collectively wetting itself because Donald Trump is promising, to the horror of the regime media and the garbage ruling class, to fight anti-white racism, which is one of the several kinds of bigotries that the leftists love. They also like racism against Asians and Jews and against anybody else who’s conservative regardless of race, but the point of this isn’t to highlight Democrat hypocrisy. Democrats are not hypocrites because you have to believe in the principle that you are ignoring to be a hypocrite, and the Democrats don’t believe anything they say about racism. They are for it when that’s useful and against it when that’s useful. They only care about power, but you know that because you are based.

Like everything else that these communists do, their race card antics are unbelievably damaging to our culture. One of the greatest achievements of the United States of America was that most white citizens didn’t think of themselves as white, for lack of a better term. They didn’t identify themselves by their race. That’s not typical. You had a majority ethnic group that really didn’t care about its ethnicity. It didn’t identify itself by its ethnicity but rather by its national character, and it invited others who did not share its ethnicity to share that national character. This was a monumental achievement, a glorious one. As someone who tried to help sort out the ethnics skirmishes of the Balkans, I have firsthand knowledge of what happens when one group of people decides they’re going to kill another group of people because they simply don’t like that group of people. It’s awful, but it’s also the typical state of man throughout history. What America did was break that horrible cycle and redefine what it means to be a human being. If you are not proud of anything else America has done, you should at least be proud of that.

But if you are, you’re not going to be a Democrat.

No, the Democrats decided it would be a great idea to start attacking the majority ethnic group based on its ethnicity. They felt this would give them power by mobilizing minorities and the wealthier members of the majority ethnic group who weren’t going to take the brunt of the petty oppressions to be inflicted on the designated bad people. You can see when this happened – when the Democrats abandoned the working class a few decades ago.

And you now see it manifest throughout society, like with his DEI crap about whiteness and how being on time and being competent are proof that you’re a horrible racist monster of racism. It’s stupid, but it’s worse than stupid. If it was just insulting, people might ignore it. But the communists are not satisfied with just insults. They have to push on past the red lines. They started taking actions that limit people’s economic opportunities based on their race and their educational opportunities based on race, and they tolerate it, excuse, and even encourage crime when it is based on race. So, now it’s not just a matter of being insulted. It’s a matter of being impoverished or hurt or killed.

And somehow, it appears that these Democrats believe that human nature will not manifest itself and that white Americans will go along with this insanity in perpetuity. But that’s not human nature. You’re not going to talk somebody into being a second-class citizen. Oh, you can convince the pale femboy graduate students and the frigid white wine women who read the ridiculous spewings of clowns like Ibram Kendi into doing it, but that is only because these leftists never really believe it’s going to affect them. The racism that they support is not directed at the ruling class or its adjuncts. It’s directed at the guy who drives a truck, the guy who sells insurance, and the guy who fights the wars. Or at least the guy who used to fight the wars. The American military was made up largely of white rural and Southern folks who loved to fight and were very, very good at it, and now many of them refuse to do it because they understand the military hates them based on their race.

Their refusal to enlist is just one manifestation. The next manifestation will be voting for Donald Trump because he’ll enforce the rules equally. But if that doesn’t work, look out. One way or another, people will not stand for this much longer.

That’s the problem with hating people and treating them differently based on their race. It’s existential. You can’t get away from it. You can’t change your color. And it is magnified because you have the communists telling you that not only should you be oppressed, but you are morally inferior based upon your race. There’s no way you can get out of it. You can’t show you’re not a bad person because you’re a bad person based on your…race.

They end up delegitimizing the concept of racism, something that is already in progress because the epithet “racist” is pretty much just a punchline today. In the current paradigm, the members of the majority have two choices. They can either submit to second-class status, or they can reject the whole damn thing. And some of the people who reject the whole damn thing are going to reject the concept that racism is bad because their opponents clearly don’t believe that. They will harken to people who tell them they will be protected because of their race, not – as Trump intends – because all men are created equal. That is a significant difference. We have race hustlers in many minority communities, and the last thing we need are race hustlers in the white community. Hell, the last thing we need is a “white community.” There should not be any racial communities. But that’s the inevitable end state of this moral idiocy. At the end of the day, in the absence of equality under the law and in society, you will bond with the people who will keep you from getting hurt.

The left has attempted to cover up its racism by redefining racism, which is invidious discrimination against someone based on his race, in such a way that it just doesn’t apply to white folks. They dress it up with discussions of power as if the strings of American society are being pulled by some corn farmer whose son can’t get into Harvard, despite straight A’s and lettering in all sorts of sports, because his great-great-grandfather came from Bavaria. It’s a super-convenient flex for the left, but it won’t work. If racism is wrong for one group, it’s wrong for all groups, and you’re not going to talk people into accepting anything else.

You’re just not going to convince people to accept second-class citizenship with the cherry on top of them being morally corrupted merely by the act of being white people. Again, it might just work for a little while if it’s only insults, but it’s now economic and academic opportunity, as well as physical safety. It will not go on because it cannot go on. And the backlash is underway.

I keep saying that Donald Trump is not the last chance for normal Americans but the last chance for our ruling class to hit the brakes and not drive off the cliff like a particularly unattractive and gender-indeterminate reboot of “Thelma and Louise.” The greatest thing that could happen to America right now is for Donald Trump to come in and have his Justice Department clamp down on all the racism currently manifested against whites and other unapproved ethnicities. The colleges should be beaten into the line. The corporations should be beaten into line. The military – oh yeah, that needs to be beaten into line. All this racist crap needs to end, starting with the racist definition of racism that the leftists keep pushing. And in the criminal justice system, when you see crimes that are clearly racist, you need to prosecute them no matter who commits them. No slack. People are not going to allow themselves to be stolen from, beaten, or murdered because of their skin tone. They’re going to find someone who will stop it. Donald Trump will stop it by using our Constitution and our laws as they are intended. But if that doesn’t work, people will find someone who will do it some other way. And don’t expect it to be gentle or pleasant. That’s not a moral observation. That’s not what I somehow prefer. That’s human nature. It’s ridiculous to expect that people will sacrifice their futures and their safety so a bunch of communists won’t call them names. That’s not going to happen.

The Democrats ruin everything, and they are on the verge of ruining the greatest achievement of the United States, which is to have a country where an individual identifies not by skin color or heritage but by his embrace of the principles of the Constitution. This is an amazing accomplishment, and of all the evil acts of these damn communists, undermining it may be their most vile.

Article by: Mark Lewis | Apr 04, 2024

We often like to say, “history repeats itself.”   This is useful, but never absolute (I prefer to say “historians repeat themselves”).  No two historical events are ever exactly the same, never arise from the precise same historical circumstances or environment, and thus can never be truly “repetitive.”  However, there are certain eternal principles of action that, if continually duplicated, will frequently produce similar results.  If you beat your head against a wall every day, don’t be surprised if you end up with a headache every day.  In this way, history can “repeat itself.”

We do see, in history, certain happenings that parallel each other.  Some events are alike in many respects and can lead to similar outcomes.  When we look at the 1980 presidential election, and compare it with the upcoming 2024 contest, we can perceive several resemblances that could give Republicans a measure of hope.  I want to discuss a few of these “parallels,” but also, as a warning, mention a major difference.  These parallels and differences make a concomitant result possible, but not certain by any means.

First, some parallels.

1.  Carter and Biden—two of the worst presidents in American history.  Historians like to take “polls” and “rank” the presidents as to who the great, the mediocre, and the failures were.  Since most historians are liberals, their polls are virtually worthless.  My poll wouldn’t look anything like any Harvard history professor’s.  By every possible, intelligent standard, Jimmy Carter was a failure as president of the United States, domestically and internationally.  Joe Biden has been the same.  America has had 46 Presidents, and they should both be at, or very near, the bottom of the “greatness” scale.

So, in both 1980 and 2024, we have failed presidents desiring a second term; it is, of course, not guaranteed yet that Democrats will give Biden that opportunity.  But he wants it, for sure.  These two election years have that in common.

2.  Perceived American weakness abroad, economic malaise at home.  Nobody around the world fears Joe Biden, indeed, he is being mocked in many places.  The world is not a safer place today than it was in 2021 when he became president.   And, concomitantly, the world was not more secure in 1980 than it was in 1977 when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated.   The Iranian hostage crisis made Carter look weak, and Americans didn’t like it.  Biden hasn’t solved any international disturbances, he screams for more taxpayer money for a useless and futile Ukrainian war, he is clueless how to handle the Israeli-Hamas conflict, our greatest enemy (China) is his buddy, and his open border policy is beginning to irritate even some Democrats.   Domestically, Biden is trying to tout his “low unemployment rate” and “GDP” growth, but the numbers are, at best, being skewed, and middle-class Americans sense and know the economy is not good.  And that it’s Biden’s fault.  The parallels here to Carter’s “stagflation” in 1980 are unmistakable.
3.  The Republicans are nominating a “conservative, pro-American” candidate.  Ronald Reagan was a true conservative, of this there is no doubt.  Donald Trump says many of the right things that have gotten the Republican “base” excited about his candidacy again.

So, some distinct “parallels”—a failed, weak liberal Democratic President against a feisty, conservative pro-American Republican.   1980 and 2024.  Reagan won in a landslide.  Let’s hope history repeats itself in that way.

But there is at least one decided difference that needs to be mentioned.

1.  America isn’t the same country in 2024 that it was in 1980.  The leftward drift of the nation in the last 40 years is unmistakable.  There are nightmares happening today that we never even dreamed about in 1980, and would never have been tolerated, even by Democrats:  drag queens, child mutilation, pedophilia, transgenderism, open borders, political oppression of opposition—and a host of other anti-Christian and anti-American activities.  These are staples of the Democratic Party now; they certainly were NOT in 1980.   Obviously, America has moved much farther into globalism and hedonism in the last 40 years.  This year’s election is being held in a far different environment, nationwide, than in 1980.  Even Ronald Reagan would have difficulty getting elected in this current moral and anti-American climate.

This problem arises from the fact that we have lost the education system.  The 1960s radicals became the college professors of the 1980s and beyond, and thus the last two generations of American youth have been propagandized by godless, Leftist ideology.  Normal, decent Americans, and churches, didn’t realize what was going on in the classroom, and we’ve only just begun to wake up to it.  But now, for the “millennials,” it’s too late.  They have been grounded in far left-wing ideology, and the Democratic Party is now their home.  These 1960s Leftists were anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-history, anti-science, and were globalists, Marxists, and pro-licentiousness and promiscuity.  And, again, they pilfered America’s education system.  We are seeing the disastrous fruits of it today.

The modern Democratic Party, which never was terribly moral to begin with, has become the entrenched home of these brainwashed masses.  The Democrats’ power and positions come from these people, and they aren’t going to go back to normalcy and decency—power is the temptation they cannot resist.  So, we find a completely different “zeitgeist” in America in 2024 than in 1980.  Whether the country has swung so far to the Left as to be no longer capable of electing a traditional, pro-American president is what we will find out in 2024.  I can’t answer that question.  Only November can.

Thus, we will have a largely conservative, pro-American candidate running against a miserably failing leftist president.  That combination, in 1980, led to 12 years of Republican presidencies.  Let’s hope that parallel holds up.  But it IS a different country now, and whether enough decent Americans exist to still save the country is the matter to be decided.

How will history handle this one?

Occupied Gaza

Prior to October 7, there were roughly two million Arab citizens of Israel but no Jewish citizens in Gaza. Gazans in 2006 voted in Hamas to rule them. It summarily executed its Palestinian Authority rivals. Hamas canceled all future scheduled elections. It established a dictatorship and diverted hundreds of billions of dollars in international aid to build a vast underground labyrinth of military installations.

“Collateral damage”

Hamas began the war by deliberately targeting civilians. It massacred them on October 7 when it invaded Israel during a time of peace and holidays. It sent more than 7,000 rockets into Israeli cities for the sole purpose of killing noncombatants. It has no vocabulary for the collateral damage of Israeli civilians, since it believes any Jewish death under any circumstances is cause for celebration.

Hamas places its terrorist centers beneath and inside hospitals, schools, and mosques. Why? Israel is assumed to have more reservations about collaterally hitting Gaza civilians than Hamas does exposing them as human shields.

“Disproportionate”

We are told Israel wrongly uses disproportionate force to retaliate in Gaza. But it does so because no nation can win a war without disproportionate violence that hurts the enemy more than it is hurt by the enemy.

The U.S. incinerated German and Japanese cities with disproportionate force to end a war both Axis powers started. The American military in Iraq nearly leveled Fallujah and Mosul by disproportional force to root out Islamic gunmen hiding among innocents. Hamas has objections to disproportionate violence — but only when it is achieved by Israel and not Hamas.

“Two-state solution”

Prior to October 7, there was a de facto three-state solution, given that Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza were all separate states ruled by their own governments, two of which were illegitimate without scheduled elections.

It was not Israel, but the people of Gaza and the West Bank who institutionalized the “from river to the sea” agenda of destroying its neighbor.

Israel would have been content to live next to an autonomous Arab Gaza and West Bank that did not seek to destroy Israel in their multigenerational efforts to form their own “one-state solution.”

“Ceasefire”

The so-called international community is demanding Israel agree to a “ceasefire.” But there was already a ceasefire prior to October 7. Hamas broke it by massacring 1,200 Jews and taking over 250 hostages.

Hamas violated that peace because it thought it could gain leverage over Israel by murdering Jews.

Hamas now demands another ceasefire because it thinks it is no longer able to murder more unarmed Jews. Instead, it now fears that Israel will destroy Hamas in the way Hamas sought but failed to destroy Israel.

Did Hamas call for a cease-fire after the first 500 Jews it massacred on October 7?

“Ramadan”

President Joe Biden believes that the Muslim religious holiday of Ramadan requires Israel to agree to a ceasefire.

But did either Hamas or any other Arab military ever respect Jewish — or even its own — religious holidays?

The October 7 massacre was timed to catch Israelis unaware while celebrating the Jewish religious holidays of Simchat Torah, Shemini Torah, and Shemini Atzeret on Shabbat.

Moreover, Hamas’s surprise attack was deliberately timed to commemorate the earlier sneak Arab attack on Israel some 50 years earlier.

On October 6, 1973, the Israelis were the target of a surprise attack when celebrating the religious holiday of Yom Kippur. Arab armies also assumed they would achieve greater surprise when attacking during their own religious holiday of Ramadan.

So, Arab militaries fight opportunistically both during Jewish and their own Islamic holidays. Egyptians and Syrians still boast of their 1973 surprise attack on Israel as the “Ramadan War.”

Only Westerners, not Arabs, believe there should be no war during Ramadan.

“Civilian casualties”

Israel risks the lives of its soldiers to prevent civilian deaths. Hamas risks the lives of its civilians to prevent terrorists’ deaths. Israel considers it a failure, and Hamas considers it globally advantageous when more civilians die than its soldiers.

“Foreign aid”

The Biden administration threatens to cut off or slow-walk aid to Israel if it continues to retaliate against Hamas even though they started the war. So the administration promises to give more aid to Gaza after the October 7 Hamas massacres than it gave to Gaza before Hamas’s attack.

“Prisoners”

The international community that favors Hamas, nevertheless, knows it would be safer to be a prisoner of Israel than of Hamas. It knows women are not going to be raped in custody by Israelis but are by Hamas. And the unarmed are more likely to be mutilated and decapitated by Hamas than Israelis.

Is the international community more likely to charge Israel than Hamas for war crimes because the Jewish state seeks to avoid civilian deaths that Hamas finds useful?

In a 2016 episode of the science fiction series Black Mirror, a young woman named Lacie lives in a world where people rate every interaction they have with another person.

Think of rating a restaurant on Trip Advisor. Except in this scenario, they’re rating you.

In this dystopian scenario, Lacie obsesses about improving her “rating.” Whatever she says and does could make or break her future—from the cost of her rent to the quality of her healthcare. 

Inevitably, this leads people to associate with those who have a higher rating and disassociate with those who have a lower one.

Turns out that Lacie isn’t very good at navigating this system. By the conclusion of the episode… Well, let’s just say it doesn’t end well for her.

Black Mirror is fiction. But the society it paints is becoming a reality in the People’s Republic of China. 

You may have heard of it. It’s called the Social Credit System. By all indications, it’s the future of that country. If we’re not careful, it may be our future here.

Pei Li left China to get away from the all-seeing eye of the Chinese government. He fled to the West in search of freedom, and found it in the United States. 

But now He’s seeing troubling signs that remind him of what he left behind.

The loss of freedom doesn’t happen overnight. The Chinese Social Credit System has been decades in the making.

It was okay at first. These things always are. Throughout the 1990s, Chinese banks developed financial credit rating programs—like those we have in America—to increase lending in rural areas. So far so good.

But government officials soon realized that similar programs could be set up to gather other information about the behavior of its citizens.

By 2014, new technology allowed the state to monitor what people said, did, bought, read, and searched on the Internet.

Why? Because more data equals more control.

That year, the State Council, China’s highest administrative body, issued a blueprint for phase one of the Social Credit System. The central government then established pilot programs in 43 cities across the country. 

In one of those cities, Rongcheng, local officials labeled certain behaviors as either acceptable or unacceptable. Every adult was assigned 1,000 social credit points. They gained or lost points depending on how well their public and private lives conformed to government standards. Buying diapers was fine: you’re taking care of your family. Playing video games: questionable because the state sees it as a sign of laziness. And discussing religion or grumbling about state policy: unacceptable.

Lose too many points and you might miss out on privileges like bank loans, faster internet, and plane tickets. I wonder if “toxic masculinity” or just being white, or christian, republican will be factored in? Maybe these things already are. Isn’t that what DEI and Affirmative Action are?

Right now, big companies such as Alibaba work with the government to make the system viable. Imagine the government knows and judges what you buy on Amazon, and you get the idea.

It’s assumed that in the near future, the system will be mandated for all Chinese citizens. Already, many people have been “enrolled” without their knowledge.

Some in China think that the Social Credit System promotes good behavior, addressing everything from crime to bad driving and financial delinquency.

But the system doesn’t stop there. The problem…who determines “good behavior?” Where is the standard going to come from, Hollywood, the Holy Book, the Red Book, or worse?

It hasn’t taken Chinese authorities long to draw up massive blacklists for those deemed “unacceptable.” According to the Guardian in England, there are 23 million Chinese on those lists. And the number is growing.

One of them, Liu Hu, is a journalist who published articles exposing government corruption and censorship. The system banned him from flying, traveling on a train, buying property, and taking out loans without any due process.

The Muslim Uyghurs of Xinjiang have seen even worse. Many have been sent to reeducation camps for “unacceptable” behavior.

With examples like these, it isn’t hard to envision a time when loyalty to the Chinese government will determine all aspects of its citizens’ lives—where they live, where they work, and where their kids go to school.

Everything we see in China, we’re starting to see here in the West. Australia, Austria, and even the US have imposed or attempted to impose mandatory Covid-19 vaccinations. Government officials openly pressure banks not to give loans to disfavored businesses, like oil companies. Parents who protest what their kids are learning in government schools are labeled domestic terrorists.

Lacie’s experience is already becoming a reality for almost a fifth of the world’s population. It didn’t end well for her.

If we’re not vigilant, it won’t end well for us.

There are few things worse than being called “intolerant,” “Inflexible, or “closed-minded.” Who wants to be that? Isn’t it far better to be open to everything, dismissive of nothing?

Well, not necessarily.

Should we have any standards at all? Or should the standard simply be “anything goes?”

These are new questions for any civilized society.

For most of American history, standards of acceptable behavior were generally agreed upon.

Today, we can’t even agree on the difference between men and women. Those on the Progressive Left seem dead-set on unsettling just about every settled question—all in the name of being “open-minded.”

But can your mind be so open that your brains fall out?

Do we need to tolerate every crackpot view under the sun, no matter how harmful? No matter how ridiculous or false? Do we need, for example, to keep an “open mind” on murder? Of course not. That question’s settled (for now), and every citizen has an obligation to follow the law. Even if someone doesn’t want to. Even if he “identifies” as a serial killer.

How about a more controversial example? Consider the case of Drag Queen Story Hour, an activist organization that sends transvestite men wearing sexualized clothing into elementary schools and public libraries to read books and sometimes even dance in front of little kids.

In the name of tolerance, must we allow men to strap on stilettos and wiggle around in front of toddlers— I guess if your community wants it, but even when our communities object, even when we believe that it’s wrong?

This example is a little bit tougher for the “tolerance” crowd, not because the answer is obvious—though I think it is—but because any way you answer, someone’s views are not going to be tolerated. If we answer “yes, we do need to tolerate Drag Queen Story Hour,” then we’re refusing to tolerate the wishes of parents and taxpayers who don’t want their public property used in drag shows for kids.

If we answer no, we’re refusing to tolerate the wishes and behavior of the transvestites and community who want these performances in public schools. There is no world in which the answer to this question accommodates and tolerates everyone and everything.

So, the question that actually divides us is not whether every public behavior must be tolerated. The question that divides us is which public behaviors should be tolerated and which shouldn’t. As they say, that’s the rub.

For most of American history, if a man dressed up in sexual clothing to perform for children, he’d be arrested. Drag is not new, like just about anything, “there is nothing new under the Sun” there have always been places where, if you wanted to see this you could go. For centuries, America had refused to tolerate in public places, and certainly in the Children’s section of the public Library, all sorts of things such as obscenity, the incitement to violence, and public nudity.

Even when such laws and limits have been repealed or gone unenforced, it isn’t as though some sort of pure tolerance has blossomed in their place, where all is welcomed.

Instead, old intolerance has been replaced by new intolerance. Fifty years ago, a teacher might be fired for teaching the Communist Manifesto in school. Today, a teacher could be fired for teaching the Bible in school.

Ten years ago, if you called a man a woman, you’d probably get a punch in the nose. Today, if you refuse to call a man a woman, you might find yourself banned from social media, expelled from school or out of a job.

So, then who decides what those limits of toleration should be?

Until relatively recently, the answer was we, the people, decide. It sounds quaint now, but we had what were once called “community standards” which were voted on locally and nationally when disagreements appeared.

And what were those standards based on?

The short answer is tradition; that is, what has worked well in the past. Some will say, “why would I trust tradition?” Well, tradition, is traditionally true. Just like generalizations become what they are because they are generally true, not always but generally.

Today we seem to live in a world with no reference to the past. We live in what British journalist Douglas Murray has dubbed “year zero.” It is presumed that we are much smarter than all those who lived before us.

This is a dangerous way of thinking because it’s not rooted in anything, (and that is not a generalization but an axiomatic fact). And it can be uprooted by the next political fad.

Of course, not everything that was done in the past was good or ought to be preserved into the future. The most vivid example is that; for centuries, slavery was commonplace, but it of course wasn’t good, and it was tradition.

But tradition is the anchor that helps us discern the good. It avails us of the wisdom of the ages. And this discernment of the good led us to abolish slavery. Even though some of the Founding Fathers owned slaves, they knew it was wrong. They were anchored in the biblical idea that all men are created in the image of God, while others tried to twist the Bible to accommodate the brutality, and dehumanization of slavery. That tension eventually guided the country toward proper exegesis of the Bible, and abolition.

If we’re going to overturn social norms, the burden of proof that radical social changes are going to make things better should be on the revolutionaries, not on the defenders of tradition: the conservatives. The conservatives have over 3,000 years of history behind them: the Bible, the Magna Carta, English common law, the American Constitution, the Gettysburg Address.

I’ll take that over tolerance, just for the sake of tolerance.

The second part of the Will Durant quote about the ancient Persian empire reads as follows:

“Nor is it natural that nations diverse in language, religion, morals and traditions should long remain united; there is nothing organic in such a union, and compulsion must repeatedly be applied to maintain the artificial bond.  In its two hundred years of empire Persia did nothing to lessen this heterogeneity, these centrifugal forces; she was content to rule a mob of nations, and never thought of making them into a state.” (Our Oriental Heritage, 382)

Can you say “multiculturalism”?

Heterogeneous societies are not necessarily doomed to disintegration.  America has been a “melting pot” almost from the beginning of its history.  But what has made the “melting pot” successful in this country is that the people who came here wanted to be Americans.  And the immigration was controlled and regulated so America could effectively assimilate the newcomers.  People came with the full intent of learning the language, customs, and culture of the United States.  Yes, for awhile, they might maintain the “old country’s” ways.  But they always eventually became Americans, taught their children to be Americans, and thought of themselves as Americans.  And they didn’t try to destroy their new home.

Fracturing a people as Leftists do is disastrous.  There must be something that binds people together, creates an organic whole, makes them one.  Some kind of homogeneity is necessary to prevent centrifugal forces from spinning a nation into oblivion.  Our Founders recognized this.  “To render the people of this country as homogeneous as possible must tend as much as any other circumstance to the permanence of their union and posterity” (Alexander Hamilton).   Thomas Jefferson agreed: “It is for the happiness of those united in society to harmonize as much as possible in matters which they must of necessity transact together.” It is very difficult for people to “transact together” if they don’t even speak the same language.

And the more diverse they become in language, religion, culture, etc., the more difficult it will be for them to live together in unity.  As we see in history, even people of the same “racial” stock often strain to exist together peaceably, and frequently don’t.  European history is full of white Irishmen fighting white Englishmen fighting white Frenchmen fighting white Germans fighting white Italians…and it is the same everywhere.  Africa to this day is full of tribal dissension and warfare.  The American Indian fought tribally as a way of life.  The slightest difference in a peoples can produce division; when differences are magnified, troubles multiply.  That’s indisputable history.

This is not an argument, of course, for America to be totally “white.”  It is an argument for a common ground for all our peoples to live together harmoniously.  It is an argument that, no, diversity is not our strength if it divides us.

Leftists are determined to expand this negative sort of “diversity.”  By doing their best to portray white America as the greedy, thieving, racist oppressor of the rest of humanity, there becomes no motivation for any non-American immigrating to this country to assimilate at least some (not all) of his values or mores for the greater good of the whole.  America has indeed borrowed and learned from many cultures.  But that amalgamated culture is what unites us. By constantly degrading that culture as “white supremacy” (which it is not), Leftism is splintering and dividing America in ways that are driving people apart rather than bringing them together.  As long as we can remember we are all Americans, then we might have enough glue to remain united.  But if we force people to “press one for English,” we are creating and encouraging a diversity that will rend us asunder.  Remember Persia.

Again, this is no argument for “white supremacy,” nor that American culture is superior to others (though I seriously doubt Ben and Jerry’s owners would want to sleep in a teepee in North Dakota in the middle of the winter).  But if people aren’t willing to assimilate, to become part of the integrated whole—and if they are not educated to do so—then…Persia.

The same happened to the Roman empire.  Rome ruled a motley of peoples, and eventually failed to make Romans out of most of them.  Thus, when the barbarians attacked, the non-Romans weren’t going to die for Rome; why should they?  As long as they were compelled to remain within the empire, or saw some benefit for doing so, they acquiesced in being a part of it.  But when the compulsion or the benefits disappeared, they saw no reason to continue being loyal to a system that was not theirs.  And they didn’t.  Heterogeneity—diversity—did much to destroy the Roman empire.

It is absolutely no coincidence that the longest running continuous states/empires in history—Egypt (B.C.), China, Japan—were among the most homogeneous.  They kept their “oneness” intact, even through dynastic changes.

We should never degrade another person’s culture.  But neither can we let them destroy our country in their pursuit of their own.  When honoring your heritage or culture supersedes assimilating into the country where you intend to live, then you don’t belong in your new home. There are many, many men who gave their lives to protect the values, traditions, and beliefs that modern Leftists are doing their utmost to destroy.  Countless men died to give Barack Obama the opportunity to go around the world and denigrate the very system that gives him the right to do it.  What a crass hypocrite.

Leftism fails because it deliberately destroys the foundations upon which a society is built—and replaces it with nothing unified and whole.  It is deliberate, for heterogeneity can only be maintained by totalitarian force, the very thing the Left craves.  Biden and Democrats are willingly dividing America for the sole purpose of enhancing their own power and control.  That’s Leftism.