Posts Tagged → western civilization
Hanuka 2023, every USA conservative is a Jew
The past seven years have seen increasingly aggressive censorship and violence against American conservatives, especially on college campuses. Since the October 7th Hamas massacre of Israelis, American Jews find themselves under violent attack, especially on college campuses. Conservatives and American Jews don’t often occupy the same space, but now they do, and they should support each other.
Historically, Jews have been the canary in the coalmine for civilizational health. Countries where Jews have enjoyed freedom have done exceedingly well, and countries that murdered, robbed, raped, and expelled their Jews have fallen by the wayside. The proofs for this assertion are legion, and they include ancient Rome (what is Italy today?), 15th century Spain (what is Spain today?), modern Germany, Soviet Russia, and almost every single Muslim country today. And yes, modern Germany is rapidly swirling down the toilet. England is swaying wildly on the fence, and America is not far behind.
Western civilization is failing, and one of the victims, the beleaguered Jew, is the most prominent symbol of the evil forces that are tearing our western nations apart.
As a result of Hamas’ October 7th massacre of Israelis and their still unending rocket barrages on Israeli civilians, and then Israel’s just response to that blitzkrieg, the world has been engulfed by a mostly Islamic movement to dehumanize Jews and delegitimize Israel and Western Civilization. A bunch of white sadists and envious losers have joined in the pro-Hamas, pro-genocide, pro-Apartheid marches.
In case you have not been paying attention, Jewish-owned restaurants in Australia, Britain, Canada, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, have been targeted by violent mobs chanting about Israel and killing Jews. This same effort has also engulfed nearly every single American university, where conservatives and free speech have been aggressively banned for the past seven years. It has been interesting to see this intersection of Jew haters against freedom of speech, because their actions have shined a bright light on the plight of all American conservatives.
Turns out, American conservatives share the same fox hole as American Jews. Both are subject to unfair and unconstitutional vilification, dehumanization, and suppression of their basic human rights by the very people who claim to be the most tolerant, most open minded, most caring. Ahem.
The other day three major university presidents (UPenn, MIT, Harvard) sat before Congress and each testified that people calling for the genocide of Jews on their college campuses was not necessarily against their college policies. What a disgrace. It was shocking to see these cookie cutter leftist women presidents smirking and being coy while playing their word games. Had the words black, Hispanic, gay, transgender, lesbian, Muslim etc. been substituted for the word Jew in this policy discussion, well my gosh, of course that would have violated their college policies against hate, bullying, and harassment.
But not Jews. Nope. With Jews, these very sophisticated and exclusive women leaders had to judge the “context” in which the calls for genocide happened. Was the Jewish student actually being genocided on MIT or Harvard’s campus, like hanging from a lamp post with a rope around his neck? Well, that would certainly violate their school policy against hate, harassment, and bullying. But up until that physical violence, why, calls for genocide against Jews is just free speech, they said.
University presidents who never gave a hoot about free speech, but who rather inflicted un-American McCarthy-esque speech codes against their ideological opponents are suddenly all for free speech when it comes to calling for massacring the Jews. And this strange thing has naturally and refreshingly caused quite a backlash.
What is happening here is that the Jew is the breakwater for the American conservative, who has been illegally pounded into dust for years by the same racist , Stalinist, Hitlerite Diversity-Iniquity-Equity university/ media/ government people as were testifying before Congress the other day.
If America can agree that treating Jews differently and much worse than everyone else is wrong, then I think we are also about to agree that the evil Stalinist Diversity-Inclusivity-Equity critical race theory nonsense that put both Jews and conservatives on the chopping block was a huge un-American mistake. It is time for this nonsense to end, and for the rule of law and constitution to return.
Tonight is the first night of Hanuka, a 2,300-year-old Jewish festival that is about religious freedom in Israel earned by the edge of the sword. There is nothing joyful or miraculous or oily about Hanuka. This holiday was and still is only about the need to fight like hell with everything you have if you want to survive. The ancient Jews prevailed militarily against the enemies of all that is good, in the land of Israel, and this is what is celebrated this week.
Sounds like a good message to American conservatives and Jews alike: Fight back against the evil that is engulfing America, including the college campuses that are supposed to be beacons for learning, or you will lose everything. Firing these three evil university presidents at UPenn, MIT, and Harvard will be a good step forward.
Some “palestine” chants I can live with
Patriotic Americans sick and tired of genocidal maniacs chanting in our streets, demanding that Western Civilization roll over and die for them can enjoy some “palestine” chants that would make sense to me:
“Pave, pave Palestine…save, save humankind”
“Nuke, nuke Palestine…save, save humankind”
“Fake, fake Palestine…go back to your own kind”
“From the river to the sea, the Jewish People will be free”
“A billion Muslims, sittin’ in a tree…won’t you leave some space for me”
“Hey hey, ho ho…palestine has got to go”
“Palestine apartheid…means Jewish genocide”
“Palestine apartheid…means Christian genocide”
I could go on with many more creative chants, but you get the point. Way over a billion Muslims can’t make room for fifteen million Jews on Planet Earth? Really? That isn’t fair. That is genocidal. It is apartheid.
Every Western nation has to commit suicide in the name of failed multiculturalism? That is also genocidal against Christians and Caucasians.
If so-called Fakestinians are so “indigenous” to Israel, then why is their mosque sitting on top of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem? Doesn’t that ancient Temple symbol of the Jews being in Israel a long time before the imperialist and colonizing Muslims arrived kinda stick in your eye?
This Jerusalem temple thing is a problem everywhere, actually. Hindu and Sikh temples and Christian churches from Europe across India have mosques sitting on top of them. That’s not the “indigenous” people building the latest thing, that is a symbol of Islamic imperialism and colonialism claiming other people’s holy sites.
And it is this Islamic imperialism and colonialism that is at the heart of the problem in the Middle East.
Should people be able and willing to live together? Sure! I would hope so. America and European nations sure have been bending over backwards to accommodate people who really hate us. Awful lot of waiting and waiting on people to assimilate and adopt our pluralistic, tolerant values.
In Israel, a lot of Muslims live better than they live anywhere else. But outside of Israel, so far, the ancient history and the recent history both indicate that the Muslim side wants to dominate and control every place and every person on Planet Earth. That is not politically or culturally sustainable.
It is also simply not fair, and no one who thinks about this issue is going to conclude that the billion-plus Muslims are victims, because the evidence is that they are perpetrating great crimes against minority people everywhere. At some point, people in Ireland and Israel and elsewhere are going to fight back.
Personally, I think Islam is a very cool religion. And I also think it needs a reformation just as Judaism (1,800 years ago) and Christianity (500 years ago) went through reformations.
Speaker Johnson’s religious behavior
Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson is being widely criticized in the mainstream media for kneeling in prayer while on the job the other day. I watched one mainstream media TV personality take Rep. Johnson to task in an interview, about minding the supposed “separation of church and state,” and “keeping prayer in private,” and not letting it out into the public sphere.
Pretty curious approach, given that across America and Europe hordes of bloodthirsty primitives have also recently knelt in prayer in public spaces, promoting baby butchery, baby baking, and gang rape with a huge helping of subsequent mutilation and torture on Israelis, to the great joy of mainstream media. Why all these sincere people, just look at them, bless their hearts. Get them some brown shirts and night sticks.
The Left’s love affair with radical Islam is no secret, and it is just and fair to say this love affair exists because both the Left and radical Islam seek absolute destruction of Western Civilization with a resulting dominion over everyone and every thing on Planet Earth. The Left and radical Islam have a common cause, and whatever differences they have will be settled between one another once people like Rep. Johnson and his religion are out of the way. Keep this foremost in your mind as the drumbeat about Rep. Johnson’s Christian practice goes on.
Couple of things about this Mr. Smith Goes To Washington’s religiosity.
First, Christianity is the founding belief system of America, albeit that was a nascent and broad minded Protestantism that immediately resulted in the anti-slavery abolitionist movement. America’s pilgrims and Founders also identified strongly with the Jews’ quest for freedom from evil tyrant Pharoah, and with the Torah’s value-laden story of that quest. And so thousands of towns and locales across America are named after Biblical places like Hebron, Shiloh, Judah, Bethany, and Zion. Christianity’s sacred Judaic touchstone places, and their inherent unspoken values, are interwoven into the cultural fabric of America from our very beginning.
Second, Christianity is still the main and largest repository of morality and right action in America. This is a cold numeric fact, not a defense of or advocacy for Christian theology. As sad and deflated as American Christianity is right now, it is nonetheless still the biggest single force for all things good and for learning about good values in our nation.
You oppose Christian theology? OK, so what is your suggested substitute in its absence here in America? Atheism? Well, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Stalin are all great advocates for atheism and horrible, unjust places to live. Judaism? You think 200,000,000 Americans are going to convert to orthodox Judaism? Never! There would be an immediate and everlasting shortage of pickled herring, and so the rabbis would never allow it. Radical Islam will cut your throat, cut off your head, or throw you off a roof, sometimes all three, so nah, hard pass on that, right?
So, I say an occasional annoying knock on the door by some nice church ladies is a small price to pay for living happily in the most successful nation in the history of humanity.
The Left’s attacks on Christianity are strategic. If they can brow beat, shame, drown, flood, and eliminate Christianity, they will eliminate America’s renewable, sustainable, organic cultural source of opposition to the Left’s tyranny, immorality, and evil.
The Left has gotten really creative about their attack on Christianity, and they have only succeeded to date because of the long flaccid acquiescence of American traditionalists and Christians, and by the Left’s official enablers, the GOPe. By accusing Christians of establishing religion when they merely practice it, a la Rep. Johnson, the Left has appealed to the First Amendment’s clear prohibition against establishing a formal state religion for America. And yet, the truth is Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims all are merely expressing their First Amendment rights when they pray in private or in public. None of their public prayer behavior establishes any of these religions as the de facto state religion of America.
What the Left really objects to is anyone actually seeing the Christian religion practiced in public. Their message is it’s a dirty practice that people ought to keep to themselves behind closed doors.
Rep. Johnson’s public prayer on the US House of Representatives floor is an in-your-face to the tyrants and cultural Marxists in the mainstream media. And of course history is on the side of Rep. Johnson, because the US House of Representatives opened with public prayer for I don’t know how long, but for the vast majority of the chamber’s existence. And when inaugurated in 1789 as America’s first president in Manhattan, New York, George Washington led a grand procession to Trinity Church on Wall Street, where he led an hours-long prayer service.
It is only when America now finds itself in the throes of hypercoagulative materialism that its own long and deep religious roots, and religion’s fruit-bearing shading branches, become anathema. So what a breath of fresh air is this Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, this cherubic Rep. Johnson.
Don’t stop, Rep. Johnson, for all our sakes, I pray you, do not stop and do not back down, and may you shine as a beacon light to Christians everywhere, and may that rallying light shine and defeat the cruel darkness that is swallowing my civilization. I may not agree with you on the particulars, but by God I will defend your right and our collective necessity to have you pray in the US House of Representatives.
Either Christianity will save America as a free constitutional republic, or America and western civilization will die.
May God bless you, Rep. Johnson.
The king you got, not the king you wanted or needed?
Two days ago was Coronation Day in England, whereupon the former very very longtime Charles Prince of Wales became Charles King of England AKA King Charles III. Even in The Year of Our Blessed Freedom From Monarchy 2023, this is still a big deal, because like it or not, kings and queens can matter when they want to, for better or worse.
This new king follows on the heels of his most amazing and impactful mother Queen Elizabeth, whose traditional values and top notch leadership skills many people miss. It appears Charles also wants to matter, like his mother, to be of consequence, to make what he believes is a positive difference on Planet Earth. So, we take note of his ascendence. He may not be the high caliber of his mother, who many would have liked to have seen replaced by another woman or man of equal qualities (good luck finding such a person anywhere in Western Civilization today), but Charles is nonetheless now the monarch. For better or for worse, or most likely a mix of both really bad and some good, King Charles is not going to be invisible.
Setting aside the die-hard monarchists for a moment, there was still a lot of worldwide public interest in Saturday’s coronation, if only because several mini-dramas played out in the coronation process. One being the role of His Most Spoiled Brattiness Prince Harry (strategically blocked from camera view at the actual coronation by a tremendous red feather plume in his aunt Anne’s hat in front of him), two being the marked absence from the coronation of Harry’s horrendous harridan of a wife, MeGain Markle, three being the final and hard public point being put on Charles’ longtime relationship with Priscilla, which had been openly maintained even while Charles was married to the most glamorous human being ever to grace the earth, Princess Diana Spencer. Many people never forgave Charles for his affair and disrespecting of Diana, but now, it’s officially all over. Charles and Priscilla are officially married and officially King and Queen of England.
Surely there are other notable features of this coronation, but to me, the one that matters most is the one that almost no one (that I could find) took notice of, and that is King Charles’ masculinity and his love of field sports, notably hunting. With guns, and occasionally spears. In a world of the establishment war against boys, against masculinity and manhood, of forced and artificial feminization of men at every turn (like Bud Lite’s Dylan Mulvaney debacle in the USA), King Charles’ quiet but absolute manliness is a crucial symbol for normal people and for those who should want to return to being a natural, normal, healthy human.
If nothing else, King Charles may end up being a potent symbol of How To Be A Man. Laugh if you want about this, but at one time not too long ago, 99% of boys naturally wanted to become masculine men when they reached adulthood, to be service-minded police officers, brave firefighters, adventurous cowboys, heroic soldiers, and hunting was a bedrock experience that trained many boys for these fields. In a western world now under siege from within our borders and from within our own governments that are captured by our worst enemies, who among other things are doing double duty to weaken us by erasing manhood and masculinity from our population, having public symbols of masculinity and manhood, like King Charles, is more important than many people realize.
Setting aside his many bad policy positions, King Charles is no dithering dandy, no fop. Quite the opposite. He speaks firmly, rides tall in the saddle, properly and expertly handles rifle, pistol, and shotgun, and is not afraid to kill his own dinner or get blood or dirt on his hands or clothes. This is a king I could like and who we all need, if only because he is a real man. Long live this manly king.
Thanks to Westley Richards for this photo
What happened to Earth Day?
Earth Day began decades ago, in 1970, when I was a kid. I remember it as a distinct point in time where the people around me spoke about raw sewage and chemicals being dumped and piped directly into American waterways. Up until that point, Americans had kind of unhappily or grudgingly accepted environmental degradation and pollution as an unfortunate necessity of economic and technological progress.
But fish kills in what older people then clearly remembered as pristine trout streams, and obvious losses of waterways with once- major fishing and waterfowl hunting to untreated, unfiltered, unmitigated chemical and physical waste dumping bothered most Americans. A great deal of this pollution was out in the open, unsightly, and an obvious reflection on Americans as a people. Then the Cuyahoga River caught on fire because of all the dangerous pollution in it, and that image galvanized Americans to clean up our act.
What was happening then was public waterways and air that were shared publicly were being used as a cheap dumping ground by production facilities of all sorts. The American public was bearing the burden of environmental waste, while the same processes that generated that waste also generated income that was privatized. I am 100% for private income, but I strenuously object to using shared waters and air as a cheap garbage disposal, and so did people of all backgrounds in 1970.
Thus was Earth Day born. Fair enough, understandable enough. And the environmental cleanup and protection movement followed closely on its heels. The US Environmental Protection Agency, where I began my professional career, was created soon after Earth Day to address the obvious problems resulting from carelessness with our shared environment.
But now, after decades of increasingly crushing environmental laws and regulations that ridiculously “protect” us down to parts per trillion of chemicals that already naturally occur at those levels in the natural environment….Earth Day represents something totally different than it did in 1970. Today, Earth Day is a celebration of an all-out assault on Western Civilization by people pursuing a ridiculously impossibly unattainable “Net Zero” goal. Meaning that humans should have zero impact on the planet. None. Which naturally necessitates a complete (and unreasonable, undemocratic, authoritarian) overhaul of our way of life, freedoms, choices, food, etc.
Earth Day is now marked and promoted by people who supposedly “know better” what is right for us. And in fact almost 100% of the environmental and even land conservation organizations are politically partisan and politically extreme, embracing all kinds of cultural and economic Marxism while rejecting American capitalism and individual freedom. This shift away from cleanup to directing us on what to eat and when and where is patently bad, unfair, wrong, and in fact is so egregiously foolish it is hurting the credibility of the environmental quality movement.
When environmental groups like Penn Future and Sierra Club always protect one political party and always attack one political party, they are shown to be about partisan politics and not about environmental quality. They are political shells. And when a local land conservancy embraces evil “Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity” policies that are actually against the founding principles of said conservancy, such as private land ownership and capitalism, then we know that even the once- wonderful land trust movement has been hijacked and turned against America.
So in 2023, Earth Day represented authoritarianism, out of control Big Government, cruel assaults on and corresponding losses of individual personal freedoms and choice, and a whole bunch of other bad stuff. The fact that Earth Day is now openly un-American and anti-America tells us that Earth Day’s promoters are not trying to protect us from pollution, they are trying to take control of our lives and destroy what had been the most free nation on Planet Earth.
Supposedly in the name of saving us from ourselves. To which I and a lot of other Americans say No Thanks.
Today’s “I know what is best for you better than you do” mindset of the environmental movement is what drove me out of working at the USEPA. It is unreasonable, unproven, and every day it is shown to be wrong and wronger.
Instead of all the anti-science climate hysteria sky-is-falling nonsense, Americans should be celebrating the incredible environmental cleanup and success we have had in the past 53 years since Earth Day was first established. Tilting at environmental windmills makes some people feel like they have meaning in their lives, and if they themselves want to take on the burdens they propose for the rest of us, then they can make that choice. But they have no right to try to take away my right of choice, your right of choice. And if there is one clear indication that the loudest voices promoting Earth Day are not serious and do not deserve to be treated seriously, it is the fact that absolutely none of these people do what they say the rest of us must do “to save the planet.”
Biden’s Police State
The Police State Is Here and “Governed” by Joe Biden
Posted on April 4, 2023 at Natural Gas Now by Tom Shepstone
Joe Biden, the compromised plagiarist who Obama said could muck up anything, is now in titular charge of a police state once known as the land of the free and brave.
Western Civilization is collapsing at an ever increasing rate. The United States, the only remaining culture and force with the potential to reverse the decline, has now become a police state, with Joe Biden supposedly the chief. This chief of police really isn’t, though, as anyone above the age of five can see with their own eyes. He’s being tragically manipulated by the worst sorts of leftists and radicals, who couldn’t care less about him but need to use him to knock the U.S. down as many pegs as they can, while they can. Exactly who they are we can only speculate, but we know China and the deep state are in the mix and we know we are their enemy. They have created a police state over the last decade and we’re living in it, whether we realize it or not. Is there hope of reversing things?
The evidence we are living in a third-world police state is everywhere today. We are living in an Orwellian or Fahrenheit 451 world where offending someone in government or favored by government has now become a crime against the state. Consider the following:
Douglas Mackey a/k/a Ricky Vaughn was just convicted of a Federal crime for Tweeting a perfectly obvious joke regarding Hillary Clinton where, with a MAGA hat displayed on his profile picture, he suggested Hillary voters could vote by text in 2016. There is no evidence anyone at all took it seriously, but humor is the worst of sins for leftists. The photo on the left below is Mackey’s Tweet and the photo on the right is by a Leftist telling Trump voters the same thing. Mackey was arrested and the one on the right has been ignored by the Biden Feds. This is brownshirt police state stuff:
Senators from both parties have introduced a bill by the astoundingly Orwellian name of the RESTRICT Act, which is superficially about chasing TikTok out off the country but is really about empowering the Federal government by bureaucratic edict to shut any and all social media that doesn’t comport with the views of the state. It would further empower the outrageous deep state control of the media revealed in the Twitter files. Those files are only the tiniest bit of the wide-spread infestation of Big Tech by a deep state that is arm in arm with it as a result of the Section 230 protections Federal law gives to Big Tech companies.
Thomas Jefferson said “No government ought to be without censors, and, where the press is free, no one ever will,” [meaning that the only censors should be the citizens holding accountable their government] but today the press and Big Tech are no longer the challengers of government, as should always be, but, rather, the censors for government when it is in Democrat hands. During Biden times, we’ve seen the press and Big Tech join hands with government to squelch supposed “disinformation” on COVID, vaccines and anything else connected with the Wu-Flu. These police state censor tactics extended not only to different opinions, but also to acknowledged truths the government simply didn’t want out there because they went against the police state’s agenda.
The same censorship is increasingly evident with respect to the climate grifting scam. Government has not only merged with Big Pharma, but also Big Green, using edicts from the SEC, for example, to force us all into deals with the grifters through imposition of ESG investing policies. And, throw out documented hard-core facts about the climate, as Greg Wrightstone and the CO2 Coalition have done and you’ll be thrown off LinkedIn, as they were, and unable to advertise on Facebook. Only the official narrative of the power grabbers and grifters is now permitted if you’re big enough to attract attention. Meanwhile, John Kerry, celebrities and BlackRock executives fly into Davos on private jets for meetings that could be done on Zoom, but that wouldn’t demonstrate how they are elites well above the law and so the rest of us are left to pointlessly complain of hypocrisy that was deliberate.
We are seeing the Biden Administration, Kathy Hochul and and others, at the prodding of tax-exempt ultra-wealthy NGOs, impose gas stove bans, EV mandates and other measures to strangle oil and gas are everywhere. All is wrapped in “energy transition” and “save the planet” lies that are without foundation. Instead, we are instructed that phony models and targets are the reasons for transferring every more wealth and power to elites. Farmers in the Netherlands are told they can no longer farm as politically favored Big Tech moves in to take the land, and that is but one example of the corporatism —merger of business and government—at work throughout Western Civilization.
And, so it goes. There are hundreds of other examples, but they all come to one thing; Western Civilization has lost its virtue. Life is now a “free for all” struggle for power and riches and the virtuous aren’t even in the struggle, they are cowered into corners by purveyors of political correctness. The police state is here because we have become afraid to speak out and our cowardice has empowered government to take drastic steps to squelch all speech with which it doesn’t agree, knowing our resistance is weak. And, they’re largely correct. Our legislatures and courts are too corrupted themselves to do anything about this. Oh, we’ll win battles here and there, but the trajectory is still downward and mostly has been for over a century.
Notwithstanding this heavy dose of cynicism and foreboding, there is hope to replace the police state with a return to virtue if common men and women rise to their feet. The COVID debacle awakened many. I now find myself in agreement with multiple people I could not have imagining admiring a few years ago. Virtuous individuals may yet be found, and in strange places. There are many, many people of all political persuasions who recognize the COVID lockdowns were pure police state, did enormous damage and serve as a warning that Western Civilization can be vaporized in a matter of days. More to the point, we now know the enemy ardently desires this and won’t be beaten with law, constitutions or sill taunts about the hypocrisy of elites who where it like a badge of honor.
No, we are in a spiritual war. It is a war against lies and, as I’ve noted here several times we cannot live by lies. That was the message in every one of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s books. Most of his life was a spiritual contest with communism in its many forms and he waged it by telling truths in every imaginable way he could. He suffered through imprisonment and exile by the Soviets and, later, much rejection from the West as a weak President Ford refused to even meet with him out of fear of communist backlash. Solzhenitsyn arguably prevailed when the Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight but, today, we’re dealing with even worse atrocities and threats vis-a vis Communist China, proving the battle for virtue is an endless one.
There will always be collectivists, grifters and power seekers for whom the virtue of the individual is forever an obstacle to their own quests. Indeed, the virtuous individual is the one thing that stands in the way for the triumph of lies. And, where does virtue come from? Man cannot create it. Only the Creator can, although man forever attempts to do so. This why a return to Judeo-Christian principles is the one hope on which the future of Western Civilization rests and has always rested. Can it happen? Yes. Will it happen? Perhaps it’s too early to tell, but the hour is getting very late. We are already living in a police state.
(the original essay can be accessed at https://naturalgasnow.org/the-police-state-is-here-and-governed-by-joe-biden/)
The real Hanuka needs to stand up
Hanuka is represented today as the “Jewish Christmas,” and why not, right? Why not have more fun, more celebration, more love, more gifts. And everyone enjoys a lighter moment instead of things being so heavy and deep.
Problem is, Hanuka suffers from the same dumbing-down that has also made a mockery of Christmas and turned it too into an orgy of materialism. Religious observers in both faith groups need to reclaim what is theirs, because at the core both Hanuka and Christmas are about core values. And if there is one thing that America has lost is its core values, resulting in our culture terrifyingly spiraling down the drain. Religious holidays used to serve the purpose of instilling religious values, may we all return to that soon.
Historically Hanuka was not about silver and blue tinsel or a disarmingly childish sounding “festival of lights” that evokes fairies twirling in tutus with flashy lights sparkling all around. Rather, in reality Hanuka is precisely the opposite image, because it marked a turning point in a bloody civil war between Jews in Israel. For three generations, two Jewish groups representing divergent philosophies were locked in a brutal civil war for control of the Temple and the religious customs and practices that Jews would follow.
On the one hand were liberal secularists, Hellenists, who represented a light Jewish identity dominated by Greek culture and behavior, including unbridled sexuality. They were enabled by Greeks descended from Alexander the Great’s conquering of the region. Opposing them were the “Maccabees,” named after an orthodox Jewish family patriarch who defiantly confronted, and killed, a whole bunch of Hellenist soldiers for control of Israel and the Temple Mount. His sons carried on the tradition of fighting and killing Hellenists for several generations before the matter was settled.
The “festival of the lights” miracle stuff results from the story of the Maccabees finding one sealed pitcher of kosher olive oil for lighting the giant gold menorah in the Temple, and having it last more than the one or two days that it should have lasted, given its limited volume. Read into that fact what one will, this has become a conveniently plain vanilla and non-threatening focus of the holiday, which at one time celebrated the “decisive winning of the righteous and pure over the evil and impure.”
The bottom line is that Hanuka commemorates a Jewish civil war for control of the Jewish future, either as a feel-good universalist ethnic identity destined for dead-end assimilation, or as a daily living Biblical (Torah) truth identity. Both Jews and Christians exist today because the orthodox Jews (Hasmoneans) who inaugurated Hanuka gave rise to the religiously observant Jews who later begot Joshua Of Nazareth (or the Nazirite) and today’s Orthodox Jews. Had the Maccabees lost their civil war with the Hellenists, there would have been no Hanuka, no surviving Judaism, no Joshua Of Nazareth, and no Christianity.
Without Christianity there is no Western Civilization, and without Western Civilization there is no light in this world and all of the Enlightenment science that makes our lives so comfy today. God only knows where the world would be now, had the Maccabees not won their war against the liberal Jews of their time. Which raises two questions. First, why don’t today’s Christians celebrate Hanuka? They should. Christmas is set for the 25th of December, which closely matches the Hebrew calendar’s 25 of Kislev for the start of Hanuka, and I don’t see any contradiction in it. Second question is when do we all begin to push back against today’s destructive Hellenists, who like their predecessors in Israel 2,200 years ago are playing an outsize role in the destruction of the American and Western Civilizations?
Happy Hanuka, everyone!
President Trump, a black guy, a Hispanic guy, and a Jewish guy go into a bar
Two weeks ago, if someone had posted a “news” headline that involved President Trump, a black guy, a Hispanic guy, and a Jewish guy having dinner, it would have sounded like one of the old time ethnic jokes that were once so refreshingly popular among Americans of different ethnic backgrounds.
One of the old strengths of America back when it was America were both its diverse workers and their enjoyment at laughing at themselves and their own peculiar ethnic foibles. They did not take themselves so seriously that someone could not make fun of them, so long as they could give it right back in equal measure. This form of humor was a great cultural leveler and communal uniter of universal American identity among people from all over the world.
Well, this headline really did happen, and the real joke is what a ridiculous outcome it has spawned. It is the Russia collusion hoax, Alexander Vindman Ukraine call hoax, serial liar Adam Schiff hoax all rolled into one brief dinner.
Yes, it is true that President Trump recently had dinner at his Mar-A-Lago FBI resort and spa with entertainer Kanye West and some guy named Fuentes, who tagged along unannounced with West. I still have not bothered to research this Fuentes (Nick Fuentes?) guy, but people in the mainstream media claim he is a “white supremacist,” while he replies that he is an American Christian, or a Christian American.
While I do not know Fuentes, I do know the mainstream media, and I know that they lie constantly, and so I am going to discount what they say about Fuentes. He is probably just a right wing guy who loves a constitutional America, and right there the mainstream media begin to boo and hiss. We will address Fuentes later, but for now, he is a tag-along uninvited dinner guest whom President Trump is too gracious to eject at his doorway, simply because he does not know the guy.
Let us get a couple life rules re-established here:
a) Americans of all backgrounds should be having dinner with each other and talking about whatever regularly, even if they disagree on some things or most things or all things. Talking, arguing, even…debating…are at the core of being an American. There are no sacred cows here. But somehow Americans have become allergic to debate. They would rather just push the little buttons on their smart phones and fire barrages of digital nuclear missiles at other people, which is weak bullshit. Talk it out, people, in person.
b) Americans should remember what it was like to have old friends drop by and bring along an uninvited cousin or buddy at dinner time. This is an American tradition as old as dirt, and yet, I don’t think Americans actually have dinner any more, certainly not together as a family around a table, and not at 6pm dinner time, and certainly not with unannounced guests and strangers. Nope, Americans are now too shielded from the outside world, and too busy looking inward and handward to have dinner or discourses in person any longer. Fakebook and Twitter and whatever else other vacuous social media nonsense has taken up all the space in our lives, including our family dinner time. For shame for shame for shame.
So, President Trump lives by the old American culture rules of having dinner with someone who asks to come over, and who then brings his awkward buddy along. Good for President Trump, a confident gentleman and a thinker. Just his willingness to have dinner with Kanye West reinvigorates my respect for my president, Donald J. Trump. Especially because West was in the process of being socially canceled, and President Trump could have easily just rejected him like the social plague he carried.
But again, President Trump is way too much of an awesome all-American guy to just reject people he has known for a long time, and especially someone who had supported him politically. Trump is no typical fair weather friend politician, and he let Kanye West in the door to have dinner, along with Kanye’s unknown pal.
So why is Kanye West suddenly now such a no-no canceled non-person, after being THE person who embodied modern American culture for so many years? Uh oh, yup, you know he did it: Kanye said BOO BOO WORDS! Yes, it is true, West was dumb enough…or vexed enough… to post publicly on social media his mixed admiration combined with envy and frustrated disbelief at the material success of so many American Jews…and a lot of frustration at the negative effect so many liberal American Jews seem to be having on everything around them, politics and culture.
Like serial rapist and big Democrat Party donor Harvey “Hollywood” Weinstein, Pedophile In Chief and big Democrat Party donor Jeffrey Epstein (who did not kill himself in jail), and crypto currency Ponzi scheme master and destroyer of Americans’ retirement accounts Huge Democrat Party Donor aka SBF Sam Bankman-Fried (yes his name really is Bankman, go ahead antisemites and rejoice along with the easily humored)…I am sure I have missed a few about whom Kanye is fretting.
Folks, we have to be able to have discussions about politics and culture again. Even about uncomfortable subjects, like why such a small minority of people fields so many wonderfully positive overachievers and so many recent evil supervillians like, oh yeah, Larry Fink at BlackRock. These discussions must happen in the open, around dinner tables, on back patios, at Mar-A-Lago, at hunting camp, among friends and political enemies, between cousins who disagree on politics and between neighbors who see life differently.
Because the alternative to transparent sunshine is that nasty things grow and fester in the dark. And yes, these nasty things are growing and festering. I am seeing it more and more. You cannot ignore it away, and you cannot wish it away, and you cannot cancel it away. The more you try these infantile efforts, the more it grows in the dark. Only sunshine will disinfect it.
The only people who want to socially cancel Kanye West and to illegitimately stigmatize President Trump for having dinner with West (and Fuentes) are people who want to control everything that you and I say and write and think and do, and how we live and what we drive and what is in our bank account and what we eat and what we read. These are not good people; they are bad people. Controlling people are always bad people.
It is a telling hypocrisy that these same people hating West and Trump never tried to cancel or stigmatize their evil messiah, Barak Hussein Obama, for being personally chummy with raving racists and Jew-haters Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright, and Louis Farrakhan. That is because they like what Obama says, and does. Trump is a savior of America and the West, while Obama is the evil angel destroyer of America and the free West.
As a result of this Kanye West-Fuentes BS, I now still and ever more strongly stand with my president, President Donald J. Trump. Not because I am blindly loyal to Trump, but simply because he is the only person who stands between a living Western Civilization and the whole thing going over the edge of oblivion, an edge on which we now precariously teeter.
The Kanye West thing is just another ridiculous distraction to what is really at stake.
And do you know who the Jewish guy was at their dinner? All of Trump’s Jewish family members, that’s who. They of his blood and who are always present in President Trump’s heart and mind, and whom he would never forget or sell out. They were at that table, too. Trump brought them to dinner, as well.
We are in a war for our civilization, people. Pick a side and stand firmly on it. I have carefully picked mine. It is the side of personal freedom and liberty, free markets, sunshine, family, open doors, friendship, and America.
And President Trump.
Evil angel Obama chumming it up with racist and Jew hater Louis Farrakhan in 2005. Why aren’t people stigmatizing or canceling Obama?
Long live the Queen
England’s Queen Elizabeth II died yesterday, aged 96 and wise beyond her years. A monarch beloved by so many of The People in an age of individualism, as she was, must be special. What is intriguing is that it is not so much what Queen Elizabeth said, but both how she said what she said, and even more important, what she left unsaid. Her mere dignified if mute presence was all that was required to ensure that some event stood proudly and solidly. That is true power.
Queen Elizabeth stood as a symbol of times gone by and hopefully not completely gone through our fingers. The past times of which we speak here included dignity, respect for others, following the law, placing others above one’s self, making sacrifices in the present for future gains, fealty to a higher order and set of rules than what I myself wants right now, and so on.
You could call Queen Elizabeth the last living representative of Tradition. Not just English tradition, but Western Civilization’s traditions. As much as someone such as I might oppose monarchy on its face (more on this below), I have also come to appreciate and value the role of that tradition. Especially in light of the violent anarchic abyss swallowing up America and Europe as you read these words. Monarchy in general, and Queen Elizabeth in particular, today stand for tradition’s consistency if nothing else. And it is consistency Western Civilization needs so desperately now.
Into the breach steps Charles, Prince of Wales, and soon to be coronated King Charles or perhaps some other historic name. Perhaps he will become a King George, a name which has both greatly positive and also very negative histories. Either way, a change of name will do Charles good, especially if it changes him. It is hard to imagine a person less befitting the role of king than this Charles, because he is a spoiled playboy whose private life often reflected the 1970s’ wilder freedoms and lack of seriousness. That Charles pretends at climate change environmentalism makes him even worse, because his carbon footprint must be the size of…well, a large island I have seen somewhere. Yet he speaks down to us about our own consumptions. Yuck. Nothing undermines authority more than spoiled, contemptible authoritarians like Charles.
If there is one redeemable aspect of Charles it was his prior focus on conserving England’s spectacular countryside landscape. In that he did everything correctly, from outright preservation to careful low-impact development that reflected the ancient dovetail fit of English citizen into life sustaining shire, thatched roofs and all. Oh how I wish that this land conservation ethic had been Charles’ sole love and hallmark. This one cause alone is sufficient to mark a king with greatness and to make him a true leader of his people. England’s spectacular landscape shaped its people, and to preserve that landscape is to preserve its values and culture.
Sadly, Charles is as unstable as water, and stands at the opposite end of the character and intelligence spectrum as his now deceased mother. His endless tabloid blathering on about every ridiculous little leftist cause reveals a weakness of wit and backbone that augurs poorly. One does not know where Queen Elizabeth’s death and Charles’ ascension will take England and Western Civilization, but it is probably going to accelerate the current decline. We all can work hard to advance the cause of freedom, hope, pray, and even don Druid’s robes if it will move Charles in the correct direction as a leader. Success will probably require all of these efforts.
Half of my own family is Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, with very famous ancestors who in the 1770s bravely and successfully confronted an ascendant Britain to win freedom of choice for many from a tyrannical British monarch bent on subjugating everyone through coercive force of arms. I was raised to deride monarchy and aristocracy. And yet here I am, saying Long Live the Queen.
She was not just England’s queen, she was our queen, as well.
Queen Elizabeth, our shared civilization needs you more now than ever. May you intervene for the better from above.
Everything about this photo says “Leader.” Her steady, unflinching eye and solid, familiar hand shooting a firearm. The loving and approving gaze of the officer. How many American “leaders” today are there with her qualities? Hmmm?