From the article -- The jig is up. Here’s what disillusioned Democrats and independents and moderates need to know. What all the blue-state refugees who now live in Texas and Florida instead of California and New York City need to admit. What all the fed-up middle-class families and forgotten nonwhite voters in the suburbs need to remember: These aren’t just Joe Biden policies that are disastrous. They’re Democrat policies.
Abortion. Economy. Crime. Immigration. Lawfare. Foreign policy. Health care. It doesn’t matter what pet issue has voters down in the dumps. Democrats are in lockstep on the losing side. And anywhere they aren’t in lockstep — like on whether Israel is a victim of terrorism or a group of oppressive “colonizers” — they tow the radical line.
You think a Democrat switcheroo is magically going to secure the border and end the unmitigated illegal alien crime wave?...The same goes for Democrats’ abortion radicalism...On and on it goes. The foreign policy, welfare, and subsidy and bailout spending that have helped drive up inflation over the past three-plus years are Democrat policies, not just Joe Biden policies. The soft-on-crime ideology, push for self-styled “progressive” district attorneys, and defund-the-police movement, among other perversions of justice, are again Democrat pet projects, not a Biden-unique quirk.
* "What I Saw at a Terrorist Rally Outside a Synagogue" (Daniel Greenfield, Gatestone Institute)
From the article -- LAPD officers did not stir as confrontations escalated into assaults, shoving into mace and bear spray. Jewish community members rushed to provide water bottles to the affected. Only after several such incidents did the LAPD finally bring in reinforcements and push the Hamas supporters away from the synagogue entrance (dispersing them to harass and threaten two other synagogues) while also clearing Jewish families away from the other side of the street who had been peacefully waving flags near a children's school.
The terrorist hate rally spread outside three synagogues, Congregation Adas Torah, Chabad Persian Youth, and Congregation Ateret Israel (Glory of Israel), and the confrontations in the center of the street continued. There were running battles along the large commercial street, with violent assaults outside a kosher luncheonette and running battles down a residential street in the Jewish neighborhood.
The terrorist hate rally was not an aberration, It's become the new normal.
* "‘A Complete Disservice’: SCOTUS Ruling Encourages Future Government Censorship, Experts Warn" (Ben Johnson, Washington Stand)
From the article -- The majority opinion will only encourage government to continue censoring speech via a third party, according to the 34-page dissent written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. The court has a duty to uphold people’s unalienable rights but, by dodging the substantive issues at hand, it “shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think. That is regrettable.” While the Biden administration’s censorship campaign “was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to be unconstitutional” in previous Supreme Court cases, “it was no less coercive. And because of the perpetrators’ high positions, it was even more dangerous.”
“It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so. Officials who read today’s decision … will get the message. If a coercive campaign is carried out with enough sophistication, it may get by. That is not a message this Court should send,” wrote Justice Alito.
* "What to Do When Pope Francis Tells You Not to Pray the 'Rogue' Psalms" (Jules Gomes, The Stream)
From the article -- There are several problems with Francis’s exhortation. Who is to decide which verses are palatable and which are offensive? The Roman hierarchy has a track record of misinterpreting and suppressing the Scriptures. Most Catholic biblical scholars are embarrassed by this but honest enough to quietly set aside the grotesque errors of the past.
Rome refused to use the Bible’s Hebrew and Greek manuscripts for centuries, and banned biblical scholars from using scientific methods of criticism until the restrictions were lifted by Divino Afflante Spiritu in 1943. Only in the Nova Vulgata of 1979 did the Vatican correct the grotesque copyist’s error of Genesis 3:15: “she [Mary] shall crush your head” instead of “he [Jesus] shall crush your head.”
How odd that God should inspire the Psalter for pre-modern man and not for Francis’s “modern man,” who is presumably far more enlightened and has the luxury of sanitizing the Psalter according to Enlightenment sensibilities. Francis’s appeal to novelty (argumentum novitatis) is a logical fallacy.
Of course, in one sense, the Psalms reflect a historical context and a religious mentality that are no longer ours. This is true of the entire Bible. But Francis would be surprised how the “religious mentality” of the Psalter that he so breezily dismisses is still very much alive in non-Western cultures.
* "From Darwin to Orwell: How the global tyranny began" (Niall McCrae, TCW)
From the article -- Arguably the most important event in modern history was publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859. This came at a convenient time for the ruling class. Darwin’s thesis had two radical implications: it undermined the accuracy of holy scripture, and removed the special status of human beings. Such departure from Christian teaching led to Social Darwinism, an offshoot of evolutionary theory based on the notion that philanthropic society was nurturing the weak (upending survival of the fittest).
The Industrial Revolution had created a vast and potentially unruly working class, who were beginning to gather strength through the labour movement and political representation. The upper class feared for their future. This was the context in which Darwin’s nephew Francis Galton founded the pseudoscientific endeavour of eugenics.
The quest to improve the quality of human stock took hold in the intelligentsia, medical profession and politicians. Notable in the eugenics movement was the Fabian Society, which controlled the Labour Party. Fundamental to eugenics is state control over who should live or die, a philosophy brutally applied after the Bolshevik revolution imposed on the mostly peasant populace of holy Russia.
