Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump hold a Gaza Strip crisis press conference, February 4, 2025
Ethnic cleansing is the explicit goal of Islamists regarding Palestine: they seek to make it judenrein in the clinical, Nazi sense of the term. To that end, Hamas—one faction of that demonic movement, composed largely of Palestinian Arabs—unleashed an orgy of sadistic, fiendish slaughter on October 7, 2023. That day, they murdered 1,200 Israelis—Jewish Palestinians living and celebrating near Gaza—without mercy, sparing neither women nor children, not even infants, whether in or ex utero. Another 250 they abducted, holding them as bargaining chips to secure the release of hundreds of Islamist fiends imprisoned in Israel so that they can resume their genocidal operations.
Israel responded to this enormity by purging Gaza of Hamas, in course of doing so rendering it virtually uninhabitable. In the aftermath of this devastation, President Trump has proposed a humane but temporary refuge for Gaza’s beleaguered civilians—an alternative to the ruin that defines the enclave. No one, least of all Trump, has advocated forcible expulsion or barring the return of those who accept the offer. The goal has never been to make Gaza araberrein (frei von Arabern), any more than it has ever been Israel’s aim so to render the Jewish state. Rather, Israel and the civilized world—against whom the Islamists have declared war—have insisted upon a Gaza that is terrorfrei (frei von Terror).
A Palestinian woman holds her daughter as she walks past the rubble of houses destroyed during the Israeli military offensive, Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, July 10, 2024. (Reuters Photo)
Trump’s proposal is a humanitarian response to the wreckage wrought by October 7—the Islamist attempt to render all of Palestine judenrein. If successful, he will not be making Israel safe again, but safe, period—or at least as safe as any nation can be this side of God’s manifest Kingdom.[1] For this, he deserves not calumny, but recognition as one of the Righteous Among the Nations (חסידי אומות העולם, Chasidei Umot HaOlam).
Note
[1] That’s when Ezekiel’s prophecy (and so many other prophecies about ingathered and restored Israel) will be fulfilled: “After many days thou shalt be visited: in the latter years thou shalt come into the land that is brought back from the sword, and is gathered out of many people, against the mountains of Israel, which have been always waste: but it is brought forth out of the nations, and they shall dwell SAFELY all of them.” Ezekiel 38:8 (emphasis added). Dwelling safely has never characterized the life of Israelis since the founding of their secular state in 1948 (which fulfilled no biblical prophecy).
King Cyrus/Donald Trump Jewish Temple Mount Half Shekel Israel Coin מחצית השקל (machatzit hashekel).
His courage and oratory are almost enough to explain how he came to lead the Civil Rights Movement (CRM). We must not, however, overlook his profession: he was the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, an academically trained preacher in the Baptist tradition. Such titles bestow an odor of sanctity. They didn’t deflect the assassin’s bullet—ultimately set into motion by whom, we may never know[1]—but they shouldn’t inhibit us from questioning his message.
Unfortunately, the latter was the Social(ist) Gospel (SG), not the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the wolf of socialism in sheep’s clothing of biblical passages. King’s education was downstream to the theology of SG’s American fountainhead, Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), who at Rochester Theological Seminary had studied under the orthodox Reformed Baptist theologian Augustus Hopkins Strong (1836–1921).[2]
The Rev. Howard Thurman
More immediately, King came under the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) and Howard Thurman (1899-1981).[3] Neither man held Jesus’ view of Scripture. The Bible may be profound, insightful, inspiring, they thought, even “inspired,” but not breathed-out by God, the status which it claims for itself, and all that follows from that status.[4] Through reading Thurman the young King discovered the maverick Hindu Mohandas Gandhi.[5]
“So what?,” you may ask. Here’s what: King denied Jesus’ divinity[6] and resurrection[7]. The Bible was not, for King, the inerrant word of God. Such an opinion is nonsense, the product of a naïve, bygone era. For him, it was quite errant. Continue reading “Trump’s dream: A merit-based and color-blind society”
Seated left to right: Elon Musk; Donald Trump; Donald Trump, Jr.; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Standing: Mike Johnson. Aboard Air Force One after UFC event at Madison Square Garden, November 16, 2024
Yes, Make America Healthy Again . . . tomorrow!
Where else would Bobby get a platform of this magnitude for this noble mission?
Who in Trumpworld was talking like that eight years ago?
I wish the table was large enough for Tulsi and Vivek and . . . no, I won’t list every nominee and appointee for Trump’s Dream Team. (I don’t even know who among them, besides those pictured above, was aboard Trump Force One last night.)
Many battles for peace through strength, free speech, bureaucracy busting, government downsizing, crime fighting, invasion repelling, and terrorism crushing lie ahead.
We don’t have four years to undo the dystopia of the last quarter century. Two years to the midterms. One to make a decisive difference.
Expect our enemies to live up to their enemy status, but they’ve been served notice. And expect “47” and his army to work on Trump Time, 24/7, to execute the planned reversal.
In the meantime, don’t miss (as I am temperamentally inclined to do) the many opportunities there will be enjoy the turning of the tide.
Donald Trump and family, West Palm Beach Convention Center, about 1:00 AM, November 6, 2024. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP)
Schadenfreude . . . on steroids. That’s the dominant emotion for me this morning.
Yes, I’ll look forward to learning exactly how Trump interred—Grover Clevelanded!—Sleepy Joe’s legacy and that of his feckless “insurance policy” (who will condescend to concede at the dinner hour).
To God all the glory.
The people who met defeat last night—the empty pantsuit and her equally hollow-headed Hollywood cheerleaders; the once-upon-a-time friends and admirers who disowned him; the political and judicial prostitutes who persecuted, prosecuted, indicted, impeached, and slandered him; the oh-so-ethically-sensitive “artists” who for a decade fantasized openly about how gruesomely he might be put to death—I’m gladthey’re miserable. I hope their misery induces them to expatriate, as they often dare to do when elections don’t go their way.
Nota bene: They haven’t gone anywhere. They’re already plotting his demise (again) and will stop at nothing. For they don’t hate Trump as much as they hate the people who love him, obstacles to their totalitarian designs, who number in the hundreds of millions and will carry on when his work in this life is done.
So, this morning Freude and Schadenfreude areappropriate emotions. But during the interregnum and the next four years, vigilanceis what’s required, coupled with an unquenchable thirst for justice.
I will vote for Donald J. Trump this November. When I did so in 2016 and again in 2020, I was (and am) an anarchocapitalist libertarian. That’s my utterly fallible but defensible political opinion for the Dispensation of Grace. I wish Ron Paul, who had a framed portrait of Murray Rothbard hanging in his congressional office, were running, but he’s not.
In 2015-2016, during the rise of anti-police mania in New York, I’d share this metaphor with anyone who’d listen: when I’m discussing, say, Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) with a friend in Starbucks, I want a big guy with a bat standing guard outside to protect the conversation. I’m now beginning to identify the possible spiritual costs of employing him. Continue reading “Truths the Republican Party no longer affirms or denies”
The dictionary defines a perfect storm as an “unusual combination of events or things that produce an unusually bad or powerful result.” The latter, as I see it, is life as we’ve become accustomed to enjoying it.
Four years ago, I stated my grounds and posed a question to a writer who thinks Christian Reconstruction or Theonomy meets the level of our times:
The argument . . . is over hermeneutics and confessional commitments that flow from one’s interpretation of Scripture. Do libertarians wish to have that conversation? That would be more than fine with me. I’ll need bullet-proof exegesis, however, to believe that Christians are charged, as Dominion theology teaches, with overthrowing Satan’s dominion of this world with its sex-trafficking, drug cartels, arms dealers, blood diamond trade, supervised as they are by pathological warlords; the totalitarian ethnostate of Communist China; radical Islam whose agents are sprinkled the world over; pandemics exploited by globalists and their medicrat tools; the virtually total loss of privacy at the hands of the Deep State, Big Pharma, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence; the trillions of dollars in unpayable debt and the hyperinflation that must follow central banking as the night the day—just to name some of the enormities that blight our planet.
In that post, I didn’t refer to this concatenation as a “perfect storm of crises,” but since then I’ve used this meteorological metaphor when considering our parlous estate.[1] It has come to mean any situation where a highly improbable concurrent of circumstances leads to an event of unusual magnitude or severity. I’d like to know where it falters, if it does.
“The states will determine by vote, or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land—in this case [abortion], the law of the state. Many states will be different. Many states will have a different number of weeks … at the end of the day it is all about the will of the people.” Donald Trump, Truth Social, today. (Emphasis added.)
“At the end of the day”? Say, when the sun goes down (as I once heard Bill O’Reilly quip)?
Trump’s context is, of course, the U.S. politics and Constitution, not eschatology. The end of the day (ἡμέρας)of man (ἀνθρωπίνης) (1 Corinthians 4:3), every detail of which having been ordained to come to pass (Ephesians 1:11), will inaugurate the day (ἡμέρας)of Christ (Χριστοῦ) (Philippians 1:6; not the Day of the Lord).
In that day, co-extensive with the manifest Kingdom of God, there will be no exceptions for any species of homicide. The penalty will be death (Acts 5:1-11; the Acts period being a foretaste of the Kingdom[1]). God’s will, not “the people’s,” will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10).
On the 84th anniversary of the German invasion of Poland I find myself embarking on a study that will be roughly equal parts philosophical, historical, theological, and personal. It will immerse me in the writings of 20th century American Marxists who, despite the path they took, have fascinated me. They thought, wrote, and fought in a world that headed inexorably toward the Second World War, was embroiled in it, and then emerged from it, knocked for a loop. It seemed that, directly or indirectly, these writers were always trying to make sense of the conflagration and its aftermath.
This project will involve me in the risky business of imputing motives to people who claimed to know how the world worked, how it ought to go, and where history was heading. I want to be fair to people I deem mistaken, for I was once mistaken (if that’s not a euphemism) in just the way they were. Some American revolutionaries will admit the failures of their revolutions, but never reevaluate the conceit that human beings can “remake the world.” The day I gave up that conceit is the day I ceased to be a revolutionary.
Professor Alexander Riley, Bucknell University
I distinguish the merely mistaken from those who compound their mistakes with crimes enabled by the power (governmental, academic, and cultural) they wield. Such social outlaws are to be defeated, not refuted. I’m therefore concerned that what’s called “Wokeism” marks, not a break with Marxism, but an organic outgrowth thereof. What would allay my apprehension is a Marxist condemnation of Wokeism. Until I find one, I must take comfort in the writings of Bucknell University sociology professor Alexander Riley, especially his illuminating “Why Wokeism is Not Marxist” and his scorched-earth discrediting of Mark Levin’s American Marxism,“Marxism Misunderstood.” (Please also consider taking a look at my “Marksism Levinism,” an earlier review that complements Riley’s.)
A Marxist critique of the so-called “1619 Project,” which Riley adduces as evidence for his antithesis, is only implicitly against Wokeism. I’ve been amazed to find attacks on the weaponization of the Department of Justice against Donald Trump on the front page, not of The Wall Street Journal, but of The Militant, organ of the Castroist Socialist Workers Party. (Here’s the latest; friends will attest that it’s not the first such article I’ve forwarded to them.) My mental jury’s still deliberating.
George Novack, 1905-1992
Exhibit A in my study is Marxist educator George Novack (1905-1992) under whose influence by God’s grace I did not fall. Alan Wald, whom I mentioned the other day, befriended Novack and began corresponding with him in the late 1960s and would visit him in New York City—my city—and in the end eulogize him warmly and at length, facts I learned only yesterday. (This originally appeared in the magazine In Defense of Marxism in 1992 and anthologized in 2016 here.) I now know exactly where he lived in his last years and how easy it would have been for me to look him up.
Poster announcing symposium for Alan M. Wald on the occasion of his retirement from UMichigan in 2013. https://events.umich.edu/event/12956
The life of Marxist revolutionaries, especially intellectuals, has a negative theological or atheological dimension. They are almost never unsocialized “village atheists,” but unbelief is ever in the background, or under the floorboards, of everything they think, even it only implicit or taken for granted. (It’s impolite, even beneath their dignity, to argue against religion.) In the case of the Novack, the philosophical writer, however, it had to surface sooner or later. I will foreground the fundamental question of worldview, which foregrounding will have a Christian-apologetical purpose.
Worldview is a topic to which Wald adverts every so often, but so far I haven’t caught him exploring it philosophically. That’s not his patch. He suggests that what marks off people he admires from the rest is commitment to remaking the world. Not to improving what they can, but to overhaul the whole.
In “If the problem be electoral, how can the solution be? Thoughts on our parlous state,” published January 7th of this year, the day after the political equivalent of a Democrat Party Reichstag Fire evicted The Big Steal from the headlines, I asked how we could wait patiently for another election cycle. What they did a year ago today, and during the years leading up to November 3, 2020, they could do again, effectively perverting this country into a one-party dictatorship.
In the months since, I’ve wondered whether the truth about the war against Trump’s 80 million-strong base (Trump himself is but one man), a war I had followed daily for over five years, could ever vacuum up the corrupt media’s smokescreen.
Without election integrity, which was eviscerated last year, a citizenry in a nominal republic has the potential to become either an aggregate of slaves or an army of soldiers in a kinetic civil war.
Where could people open to the truth find a patient, comprehensive rebuttal of academedia’s bodyguard of liars? How can people who wouldn’t be caught dead searching conservative websites consider what is, for them, the unthinkable?
We now have the answer: they can read Mollie Hemingway’s Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections(Regnery, October 12, 2021). Her patriotic service justifies a qualified hope that, “Yes, truth can win out.” You can read Rigged, and you can put it in their hands.
Hemingway, the eloquent, soft-spoken conservative author, columnist and commentator, a senior editor at The Federalist and Fox News contributor, will not scare off your liberal relatives. In her book, she painstakingly, but never boringly, explores how Democrat operatives, led by corrupt officials and financed by the “Big Money” they excoriated not many years ago, exploited the pandemic to make mail-in ballots the rule, not the exception thereto, and to enact voting “reforms” that make a mockery of “one person, one vote.”
Then she documents the corruption that predictably followed.
Trump supporters, who vastly outnumbered security, could have “stormed” the Capitol building, but didn’t. They had the means and opportunity, but no motive. January 6, 2021
President Trump brushed aside the notion of running again in four years. If the theft of the 2020 general election stands, why wouldn’t the thieves do it again?
In Georgia, the crooked machines that shifted votes away from him eight weeks ago shifted them yesterday to give Democrats control of the Senate. Right under our noses. Should we expect different effects from similar causes four years from now?
Trade Secretary Peter Navarro summarized with great clarity evidence that widespread, results-altering electoral and voter fraud occurred. It’s enough to show probable cause to investigate apparent interstate criminal conspiracy (if there’s ever been such a thing). Navarro’s case remains as unrefuted as it is unexamined.
Trump said “You don’t concede when there’s theft involved.” And when theft is proven, shouldn’t something analogous to asset forfeiture apply? Traces of performance-enhancing drugs cost athletes who ingest them their medals. Drug kingpins lose their homes and cars.
Should political actors who rip off 74 million voters occupy their ill-gotten offices?
Trump’s attorney Rudolph Giuliani tirelessly marshaled the evidence before cameras, at risk to his stellar reputation, but it’s been systematically ignored.
Not only by scores of jurists, who are simply not interested in it and who concoct one erudite rationale after another to evade its force.
Not only by a militant leftist media who for years fantasized about a non-existent Russia-Trump conspiracy, while ignoring massive evidence of Chinese Communist Party-Biden Family collusion .
Ben Garrison, “The Back Stabbers”
But some of Trump’s so-called friends have outdone jurists and pundits by stabbing him in the back.
Martin Luther King memorably lamented the silence of friends, but the fair-weather variety that bedevil Trump are profiles in cowardice.
Jeff Sessions’s pathetic recusal led the way. It was followed by Mitt Romney’s impeachment vote and Brian Kemp’s refusal to call the Georgia legislature into session to weigh evidence of fraud there.
State legislatures certified electors chosen in violation of their own state laws, thereby violating the U.S. Constitution. They’re complicit in the theft.
Some of them, however, realizing and regretting their error, petitioned VP Mike Pence, President of the Senate, whose office it is to open the envelope and accept or object to the votes, to send the matter back to them for ten days. That’s all Pence had to do. He didn’t have to assume the role of One-man Decider of the Election.
Instead, he waxed sanctimoniously, and irrelevantly, about his alleged inability to object to electors chosen unconstitutionally. His blather about counting all, but only, legal votes turned out to be just that.
The half million peaceable assemblers at the Ellipse on January 6th represented Trump’s 74 million voters. They’re now being smeared as “insurrectionists” by the moral equivalent of Der Stürmer, a Nazi rag that didn’t merely lie—as Pravda and Izvestia did daily under Stalin—but also slandered and defamedmillions of innocent people.
What is to be done?, Lenin famously asked. Should workers fight only to improve their economic well-being? Or also to rid the country of Czarist tyranny? (Yes, he replaced it with another.)
Should we naively continue run candidates in electoral systems that have no integrity ? How has that worked out?
Yes, we prefer deliberation to violence. But the other side is interested in vengeance—state-directed or otherwise—not deliberation over regular order.
And vengeance not only against Trump, but also his supporters who are being slandered indiscriminately and collectively in the public mind for the misdeeds of a few.
Regarding election integrity, there’s a case to be made for 100% paper ballots. Nothing online. I suggest the same goes for what is to be done about the coup.
In the wake of the Secure the Steal movement’s success, ought we not conclude that the Constitution is a dead letter, a tissue of instructions for ceremonies which the mendacious and vindictive perform to lend their crimes an air of legitimacy?
As the Deep State decides on their course of violence against the people who voted for Trump, its corporate, media, and congressional puppets decry violence (which they call “mostly peaceful” when BLM and Antifa perpetrate it).
Patriotic Americans outnumber their enemies, but are not yet strategically positioned to crush the latter. How might they get there?
Again, ask yourself, family members, and friends what is to be done, but before you answer, keep the conversation offline.
Trump has been compared to Lincoln. What we may need at this hour, however, is a George Washington.