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A YOUNG HERO: What One Australian Teen Did to Save His Family Is Superhuman.

HENRY KNOX: The Most Unlikely Hero of the American Revolution.

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K-12 EDITION

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My last essay “Thoughts on History” presented a few preliminary thoughts on the philosophy of history, particularly with regard to what I call the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics of history. Today’s essay applies those general ideas to the development a new approach to history that I call “the new moral history,” which I first introduced in America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration that Defined It.

I first began to think about and develop the idea of “moral history” in the summer of 2016 when I was just starting to write a book on the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. The revolution is, of course, the most written about subject in American history, and I began with this question: is there anything original left to say about the American Revolution and its causes and meaning? To be clear, I was not interested in writing a book on a tiny, fractional part of the Revolution. My hope, certainly my ambition, was to write something original and capacious that would open new avenues to the Revolution’s deepest causes.

As I was beginning to sketch such a history, I came upon some letters and other writings by John Adams and Thomas Paine that opened a new way of viewing the Revolution and its causes, and which led me to the conclusion that “yes,” something new and original could be said about the Revolution. Here’s what I found.

During his retirement years, John Adams thought a good deal about the meaning of the American Revolution. In a fascinating letter written to Thomas Jefferson in 1815, he asked a simple question: “What do we mean by the Revolution?” Surely not the war, he answered rhetorically. “That was no part of the Revolution,” he declared. The war, he said, “was only an Effect and Consequence” of the Revolution. The true Revolution, he continued, “was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected . . . in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.” A few years later, Adams suggested again that the “real American Revolution” was represented by a “radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections” of the American people. The former president was suggesting that the root cause of the American Revolution was to be found in a radical change in the colonists’ moral reasoning and political principles. Adams’s comments raise important questions: how and why was the American mind revolutionized in the years before 1776, and, more particularly, what new moral ideas defined America’s emerging revolutionary consciousness? Adams considered these questions “surely interesting to humanity to investigate, and perpetuate to posterity.”

Like Adams, Thomas Paine also understood that a revolutionary transformation had taken place in the American consciousness in the years leading up to 1776. As Paine put it so strikingly in Common Sense, “a new æra for politics is struck; a new method of thinking hath arisen.” He described this “new method of thinking” in an extraordinary letter to the French philosophe, the Abbé Raynal. Paine told the French cleric that the American “style and manner of thinking ha[d] undergone a revolution more extraordinary than the political revolution of the country.” The Americans now see, he explained, “with other eyes; [they] hear with other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those [they] formerly used.” This revolution of the mind transformed the colonists into “another people.” Paine identified the precise meaning of that revolution when he wrote in Rights of Man: “the Independence of America” was “accompanied by a revolution in the principles and practice of governments.” The Americans had done something, he continued, that no other people in history had ever achieved: they founded their new governments “on a moral theory . . . on the indefeasible, hereditary rights of man.” The discovery, development, and adoption of that “moral theory” by the American people in the years before 1776 is the embodiment of the “real” revolution described by Adams.

But what exactly was this “new method of thinking” and the new “moral theory” associated with the American Revolution? How and why did colonial Americans develop a “moral theory” about the “indefeasible, hereditary rights of man”? And what role did this moral theory play in the coming of the Revolutionaries’ revolution? Specifically, I began to think about how ideas affect motives and events. This was my “ah-ha” moment when I realized that these questions opened new historical vistas from which to view the American Revolution. What follows is a prolegomenon to the core tenets of the new moral history.

Broadly speaking, the new moral history is concerned with the nature of causation and agency in the course of human events. It attempts to explain behavior in given historical contexts by showing the connection between principles and practice in the day-to-day actions and interactions of men and women in a social context. This approach is not simply a history of the development of certain moral theories, although it can be that in part. Its primary goal is to examine the intersection between moral thought and moral action, between what people say and what they do (or don’t do). The new moral history studies the what, why, and how of moral reasoning, and then it looks for the connections with the what, why, and how of moral action. It studies the modes of reasoning and ideas used by individual men and women as they evaluated, judged, and dealt with their social reality, and it examines the alternatives confronted by individuals and groups of individuals as they made decisions about what to do or how to act. It emphasizes thinking, judging, choosing, and acting individuals over large-scale social processes moved by unseen forces.

The new moral history begins with certain assumptions about human nature: first, that individuals are the primary unit of moral value; second, that human nature is knowable and sometimes predictable; third, that man’s faculty of reason can know cause-and-effect relationships in nature and human nature; fourth, that individuals are confronted every day with choices, and that they have the free will to choose between alternatives; fifth, that freely thinking (rationally and irrationally) and freely acting (morally and immorally) individuals are capable of making decisions and acting on them; sixth, that purposive human agents cause events to happen; and finally, that human thought and action can have intended and unintended consequences. This view of human nature suggests that individuals are morally responsible for their decisions and actions and the consequences that follow therefrom. Thus, the new moral history puts the thinking back into ideas, the judgment back into intentions, and the volition back into actions.

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The new moral history has the benefit of being compatible with how eighteenth-century Americans saw the nature of reality, truth, causality, human nature, and the processes of historical change. All American Revolutionaries believed that there are moral and political truths—truths absolute, certain, universal, permanent, and immutable—that can be known by reason and acted upon. Such was the purpose of the Declaration of Independence—to declare certain self-evident truths thought to be accessible to all men everywhere. Likewise, in Federalist No. 31, Alexander Hamilton appealed to “certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend.” Hamilton and his fellow Americans assumed that human reason was fallible, but they also assumed that the discovery of truth about the most important matters was possible and that by grounding their principles on axiomatic truths, they could “command the assent” of the minds of their fellow Americans. These truths, they believed, could not only be assented to by other Americans, but they believed they could be understood by all men everywhere because they thought these truths transcended their immediate historical situation. The Revolutionary generation viewed these truths as objectively true and not simply as historically conditioned. It is not possible to understand the moral and political thought of America’s Revolutionary generation without knowing and respecting this fact.

Eighteenth-century Americans also assumed that society is made up of autonomous moral agents who define the course of events. Understanding men’s moral principles, their modes of reasoning, their motives, their options, their choices, and their actions was the key to understanding the role of causation in human action and history. They believed that motives explain actions, that moral principles explain motives, and that moral reasoning explains moral principles. And if events are the direct consequence of individual (and group) principles, decisions, intentions, and actions, then it is imperative for historians to study the moral principles, choices, and behaviors of individuals, which, if shared by many or most of the individuals in a society, shapes the general character of a society. In this way, then, a culture with its unique manners and mores reflects the moral character of individuals writ large, which means that historians should be able discern patterns of moral belief and action that may reveal the existence of a common moral culture. Hence the history of human events is, for better or worse, the history of men and women acting according to a conception of what they think is good, right, just, and true.

The new moral history is about discovering the causes of social events in the ideas, motives, and actions of moral agents acting as individuals or as groups. This is precisely how Thomas Dawes, a colonel in the Massachusetts militia, studied and presented the causes and consequences of the American Revolution. In a 1787 Fourth of July oration celebrating American independence, Dawes informed his audience that they were convened “to consider the feelings, manners and principles which led to our Independence—the effects which have flowed, and the consequences that will probably follow, from that great event.” Dawes was, in effect, pursuing the research project described years later by John Adams, which called for examining how and why the American Revolution represented a radical transformation in the “Minds of the People.” For Adams, the war for independence was a consequence of the “radical change” that occurred “in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people” in the decade before independence. Dawes saw the Revolution in the same way. He insisted to his audience that when “contemplating the principles which originated” or caused the war and the Revolution, they must “not confound them with the occasions that only ripened, our Independence.” For Dawes, moral principles inspire actions, which in turn create events. The primary moral principle that motivated colonial Americans to act and therefore caused the Revolution, according to Dawes, was their recognition of and dedication to the principle that their “liberties are founded on the broad basis of everlasting justice.” Their reaction to the Stamp Act, he argued, was grounded in moral principle, moral judgment, and moral action. The colonists were dedicated to a certain conception of justice, which inspired them to act when they saw it being violated by British imperial officials. To understand why American Revolutionaries acted in the ways they did, we must begin by understanding their conception of justice and what it meant to them.

This common view of the underlying cause of the American Revolution rested upon an even deeper view of human nature and moral agency. According to the Bostonian John Perkins writing in 1771, men have “absolute liberty,” which means “a person has been supposed capable of determining differently, all circumstances remaining the same.” By “[m]oral freedom,” Perkins “meant a power of determining according to apprehended good and evil; opposed to a state of moral necessity, either natural, or induced by long custom, habit, passion, or some special depravity.” Moral historians take seriously the principle that “[a]ll appearances evidence that man was form’d for self-direction; since by his intellectual judgment; disengage himself from prejudices; foresee events, and conduct accordingly.” The following year, Stephen West bolstered Perkin’s view of moral action by affirming the cause-and-effect relationship between moral judgment and moral action: “If every moral event hath an answerable cause on which it is dependent for its existence; then all moral events come into existence under the influence of their several causes—an influence which is previous to the event and extrinsic of it, and with which the event is certainly connected.” These assumptions lay behind the revolution in American moral thought and action during the second half of the eighteenth century, and they provide a window through which we can see the deepest causes of the Revolution.

How and why, then, shall historians go about discovering the objective reality and meaning of past thought and action?

Historical objectivity refers to a relationship between a subject and an object. It occurs when a subject (the historian) interacts with and accurately re-presents past thoughts, actions, or events (the object). The most difficult part of this process is to uncover the reasons behind past actions. The act of doing history always begins in the present. It starts with a historian who wants to know something about some person(s), idea(s), action(s), or event(s) in the past. The historians’ craft is an act of recovery and reenactment. It seeks, first, to recover the objective truth about the what, when, how, and why of past thought and action, and then it reenacts that recovered knowledge in the form of a narrative story. This task presupposes that scholars be motivated by more than an antiquarian interest in a particular historical subject; they must be inspired by a sincere if not a passionate sense of curiosity and a desire to know the truth about past thoughts and actions as well as their possible relevance for the present.

History’s secrets can be revealed when historians ask probing questions of past thinkers and actors in order to reproduce their thoughts, motives, and actions. Scholars must first determine which questions were uppermost in the minds of their subjects and why their subjects were compelled to ask and answer them in the way they did. At a deeper level, the moral historian will ask: What did person X who wrote, said, or did Y mean by it? In other words, why did the subject under investigation write, say, or do some particular thing?

To answer these questions, the historians’ craft requires, as we have said, epistemological modesty: it seeks to understand the thought and action of past thinkers and actors in the context of their own self-understanding. It should not superimpose on past thought and action present-day epistemological assumptions about how ideas work, which means it should not assume that the thought of the present is superior to that of the past. In fact, true historical sensitivity and objectivity means beginning with a kind of naïve wonder, which means opening oneself up to the possibility that we might actually have something to learn from past thought, and, even more shockingly, that past thought could even be superior to that of the present.

The new moral history recognizes that authors past, present, and future are responsible for the thoughts they think and the words they write. It seeks to understand particular events by examining the ends and means available to and chosen (or rejected) by historical actors in a given place and time. This requires of historians that they attempt to enter the minds of past thinkers and actors, to the best of their ability, in order to see the world as their subjects saw it, to see the problems, questions, challenges, alternatives, and choices that motivated them to think and act as they did. This means attempting to view a past world from the inside out, that is, from the perspective of the particular thinker or actor. Intellectual historians must attempt to see the world through the author’s eyes, to hear with his or her ears, and to think with and through the author’s mind. We must follow, study, and contemplate the logic and argument of a text or speech. We must attempt to understand to the best of our ability what James Otis, Daniel Dulany, Richard Bland, John Dickinson, Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Adams, James Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and scores of others from the Revolutionary generation thought and said. Only by first understanding what they thought or said can we know why past actors thought, spoke, or acted as they did.

By this method, we can achieve or come close to achieving historical objectivity, which is knowledge of what, when, how, and most importantly, why past events happened. Answering the “why” question is the great challenge of American Revolutionary historians, but to address it in a meaningful way we must confront the problem of intention and motivation directly, which is the lynchpin between theory and practice. We must seek to recover the intentions of those historical actors who participated in the train of events before and after 1776. This takes us into the world of moral reasoning, ideas, principles, motivations, intentions, and actions. But how can we know why certain individuals acted as they did? To answer this question, scholars must go in search of historical evidence to recreate a scene or moment of human action (which includes thinking). Such evidence includes written documents, which typically means treatises, essays, pamphlets, sermons, speeches, diaries, letters, petitions, remonstrances etc. from the period or individuals under examination. Historians must then read and attempt to understand the content, argument, and purposes of these texts as the author or speaker understood them. Documents must be read carefully and reread. To discover the motives of people who lived hundreds of years ago requires tireless research, reading, reconstruction, and thinking.

The new moral history recognizes that “ideas have consequences” and oftentimes intended consequences, but it must also be capacious enough in its methodological scope to recognize the complex interactions of human thought and action from multiple angles or perspectives. The most advanced and sophisticated form of moral history recognizes that ideas inspire actions and actions create events, and events in turn inspire new ideas and actions that may be different from those that inspired them in the first instance. In other words, the realm of ideas evolves and interacts with the realm of action in a dialectical relationship and where the outcomes can be different than those originally intended. Human interaction is complex and therefore history is not simply linear; it is not always an issue of individuals making choices and acting on them. Thus the new moral history takes seriously the role of contingency in human affairs. It recognizes that decisions and actions could have turned out other than they did; that certain ideas, choices, decisions, and actions carried out in different contexts can have very different results; that good ideas and good intentions can sometimes have deleterious consequences different from those intended. When ideas (true or false, good or bad) are translated into action, they can have intended and unintended consequences, some of which are short term and some long term.

Thus, the new moral history must capture the conflict of visions, choices, and actions that exists between individuals and within societies. The simple fact is all individuals must make choices between alternatives all the time, and sometimes those choices come into conflict with one another. In the context of the American Revolution, there was conflict between Great Britain and her American colonies, between American Patriots and Loyalists, between more radical and more conservative Patriots, and then between even the most radical revolutionaries. And not only was there conflict between individuals or groups of individuals, but there was also conflict (and sometimes paralysis) within the minds of each individual person as they confronted difficult choices on innumerable issues. One can see these kinds of internal tensions in the thought of reluctant Revolutionaries, such as a James Otis and John Dickinson. To grasp the wholeness of the Revolution, to understand its full depth and breadth, requires an examination of the arguments, choices, and actions of a wide spectrum of contending views. At the very least, one should assume that the principles, choices, and actions of the Loyalists and George III were just as real and just as sincere as those of the Patriots. This is why a moral history of the American Revolution from the Loyalist perspective is needed just as much as one from the Patriot perspective. Both sides must be understood if we are to fully understand the nature and meaning of the Revolution.

The new moral history therefore recognizes and brings to life the drama and sometimes the comedy and tragedy of the human condition. It acknowledges that individuals make decisions in the face of doubt and errors of knowledge. It recognizes and takes into account ambiguity, contradiction, accidents, and anomalies. There is almost always some uncertainty in human affairs because individuals have incomplete knowledge or information. The Revolutionary generation knew this fact about human nature. In the 37^th essay of The Federalist, James Madison noted that the incompleteness and uncertainty of human knowledge is grounded in three deficiencies associated with human cognition: first, the “indistinctness of the object” under examination; second, the “imperfection of the organ of conception”; and, third, the “inadequateness of the vehicle of ideas.” A veil of obscurity between subject and object makes certain knowledge difficult, and the transference of that knowledge from one person to another only compounds the problem. Madison informs his audience that developing political concepts that are true (i.e., that reflect reality as it is) and then accurately conveying and receiving those concepts from one person to another is one of the great challenges of the human condition. The discovery and transmission of moral and political truth is inherently fraught with error given man’s nature. Madison thought this fact of the human condition was the greatest source of conflict between individuals and groups of individuals. Historians face the very same problem described by Madison: the eighteenth-century objects they study are indistinct, the historians’ organ of conception is fallible, and the vehicle by which historians transmit their historical recreations is imperfect. This is why the historians’ craft calls for epistemological modesty.

The new moral history also recognizes that different individuals work on different levels of consciousness. Not all thinkers or ideas are equal. Some individuals operate at the highest level of conscious awareness, some are middling thinkers, and some follow their unconscious passions, opinions, and interests. Some ideas are innovative, brilliant and influential, while some are banal, quickly forgotten, or never even noticed. Thomas Paine, America’s best-known democratic theorist, knew that there was a hierarchy of wisdom and influence when it came to explaining the causes of the American Revolution. He knew that not all Americans could make the sophisticated and nuanced arguments of James Otis, John Adams, James Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, or Alexander Hamilton. In his Letter to the Abbé Raynal in 1782, Paine noted that in response to the Stamp Act every American “had a right to give his opinion; and there were many, who with the best intentions, did not choose the best, nor indeed the true ground, to defending their cause.” Ordinary men “felt themselves right by a general impulse, without being able to separate, analyze, and arrange the parts.” The truth is—a truth confirmed by daily experience—that a few individuals live by a self-generated, consciously chosen, and rational process of thought, while most others absorb subconsciously the dominant ideas of their culture.

The new moral history likewise acknowledges that there is a hierarchy of influence in society. The ideas and actions of some individuals have the power to motivate and influence hundreds or thousands or millions of individuals in ways that the ideas and actions of others do not. Moreover, some thinkers and writers are original and ahead of their time, while others are distinguished for summing up the dominant ideas of their time. The hierarchy of influence is also connected to actions as well. Some individuals are leaders, and some are followers. Some have skills and abilities that others do not. The fact is that some individuals did more to bring about the Revolution or to bring it to a successful conclusion than others. For instance, the fiery speeches of Patrick Henry, the organizing skills of Samuel Adams, the moral leadership of George Washington, the constitutional arguments of John Adams, the rhetorical brilliance of Thomas Paine, the financial acumen of Robert Morris, the tactical genius of General Nathanael Greene, and the literary style of Thomas Jefferson commanded a greater degree of respect and influence than did the abilities of others.

Finally, the new moral history recognizes that some ideas are true and some are false, some are wise and some are foolish, and some are good and some are bad, which means they can and should be judged by the historian. It is a historical truism that past thinkers and actors almost always viewed their own ideas as right and therefore true and those of their opponents as wrong and therefore false. The Loyalists thought they were right and the Patriots wrong, just as the Anti-Federalists thought they were right and the Federalists wrong. It seems fitting, then, for historians to test, evaluate, and judge how past actors understood the truth of their ideas and actions. The most interesting kind of history recaptures first the intellectual and then the political and social clash of two or more contending opinions about the most important questions. This means that historians must be open to the possibility that one or the other position in any past dispute was right and therefore true and the other wrong and therefore untrue, or that both positions could be wrong. The historian must also confront, observe, evaluate, and judge actions relative to the ideas that inform the behavior of past actors. If military historians can judge (and they do) some strategic or tactical decisions to be “brilliant” or “disastrous,” then it seems reasonable that intellectual historians should be able to judge moral or political ideas to be true or false, good or bad, just or unjust. The new moral history must not be a value-free social science, but, to be clear, neither should it engage in vulgar moralism or moral self-righteousness. The historian’s first responsibility is to recreate the past as it happened. Then and only then, can he or she render judgment on past thought and action. Scholars of the American Revolution should be neither scientists nor preachers. Their moral evaluation of past thought and action should be fair and balanced and conducted with great care and caution.

Consider the battle of ideas between American Revolutionaries and British imperial officials. At its core, this debate was not primarily about taxes or representation; it was about the nature of justice and right. American Revolutionaries acted on the assumption that their principles of justice and right were true (objectively, absolutely, and self-evidently true), whereas the British viewed their principles of justice and right as historically true relative to time and place. At the deepest philosophical level, the great point of contention between these two sides concerned the nature of truth itself. On some level, these competing viewpoints can and should be evaluated and judged by historians. This does not mean, however, that historians can or should be partisans for one side or another, nor does it mean that historians should anachronistically judge the past as the means by which to judge the present. The fact is that elements of truth and falsity, good and evil, justice and injustice can exist on two sides in a debate or war, particularly if it is a fratricidal debate or war. In examining the debates between American Whigs and British imperial officials or American Patriots and Loyalists or Federalists and Anti-Federalists, it is entirely proper for historians to assess and judge the power, depth, originality, influence, and, ultimately, the truthfulness of an argument. It is entirely appropriate for historians to analyze past ideas, principles, intentions, motives, and actions, and then judge them as true or false, good or bad, always recognizing that the historical loser of a political contest might very well have had the truer argument. The new moral history welcomes studies that examine and evaluate—even positively—Loyalist political thought and action or the decisions of George III. The standards by which historians judge ideas and actions as true or false, good or bad, just or unjust should be stated openly and clearly. Their standard of judgment should likewise be open to evaluation and criticism.

In the end, the new moral history has the added advantage of providing a life-enhancing incentive to those who study history. History matters precisely because ideas matter. We study past thought and action to learn from it, to be guided by it, and to provide models of right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. Thus, the study of history is primarily a humanistic and not a scientific enterprise, one that can be, and in many ways should be, restored as a branch of philosophy. Indeed, the pursuit of historical truth is a form of philosophical inquiry. As John Adams learned from Bolingbroke and Bolingbroke from Dionysius Halicarnassus and Dionysius from Thucydides, history rightly understood is “philosophy teaching by examples.” History is philosophy’s handmaiden, or maybe it’s the other way ‘round! The value-free approach to history advocated by most historians has very little to teach us in the present other than as a quaint, antiquarian curiosity. The new moral history, by contrast, can help us to recover our past to better serve our present and future.

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**A reminder to readers: please know that I do not use footnotes or citations in my Substack essays. I do, however, attempt to identify the author of all quotations. All of the quotations and general references that I use are fully documented in my personal drafts, which will be made public on demand or when I publish these essays in book form.

***ANNOUNCEMENT: I have been traveling a lot lately (just spent nine days in Texas) and will be on the road again several times over the course of the next couple of months. I’ll do my best to keep up the pace of one post per week, but I can’t promise.

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THE GOOD

THE CAUSES OF WEALTH CREATION: Understanding the Great Enrichment: how mass prosperity replaced mass poverty. Britain became the first country to do learning-by-experiment at scale.

IF YOU DO NOTHING ELSE TODAY, PLEASE WATCH THIS SHORT VIDEO FROM X. It’s a reminder of all that’s good and beautiful in life:

SOMETHING GOOD ABOUT SOMETHING BAD & UGLY: Socialism is a hate crime.

ALL CRIME IS DOWN (THAT’S GOOD) EXCEPT WELFARE FRAUD, WHICH IS UP—WAY UP (THAT’S BAD)! What is the cause of all this? (The cause of welfare fraud is the existence of the welfare State. That it would lead to fraud is a basically a law of nature.)

PRETTY SURE MOST ATHLETES HAVE KNOWN THIS FOR A LONG TIME: Pre-exercise sexual activity does not harm strength or endurance in male athletes, finds new study.

LET’S CELEBRATE TRUE HEROES: Marine Corps legend ‘Ripley at the Bridge’ is finally getting the Medal of Honor: John Ripley vs. 20,000 communists. Who you got?

MEDICINE/HEALTH ROUND UP

• High-dose Vitamin D reduces MS activity, study finds.

• Poor sleep may accelerate brain aging.

• Scientists Identified Structural, Brain-Wide Changes During Menstruation.

• Breakthrough Blood Test Detects Head and Neck Cancer up to 10 Years Before Symptoms.

• Fragments of Bacteria in Our Gut May Lull Our Brains to Sleep at Night.

THIS IS VERY GOOD NEWS, INDEED! The number of federal government employees is now at its lowest level in 50+ years. Next, let’s go for the lowest level in 100 years!

SCIENCE ROUND UP

• Fueling research in nuclear thermal propulsion.

• Maybe the Shortest Path to Mars Requires a 240,000-Mile Detour.

HEROES DON’T ALWAYS WEAR CAPES: ‘I have to keep on going’: 13-year-old swims in rough sea for 4 hours to find help for family

ARCHEOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGY ROUND UP

• Archaeologists find a supersized medieval shipwreck in Denmark.

• Ancient Jesus-era footprints discovered on Scotland beach, triggering remarkable race

MORE NUCLEAR IS GOOD: The future of American nuclear energy just touched down in Utah.

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THE BAD

IT’S WHAT THEY DO: The Communism Isn’t Working, So Let’s Communism Harder.

THIS IS MARXISM APPLIED TO THE ENVIRONMENT: The 10 Most Insane Requirements Of The Green New Deal.

OUR COMING SOCIALISM: “The Warmth of Collectivism” v. Capitalism.

“OBSTA PRINCIPIIS”—“RESIST FIRST BEGINNINGS”: 7 left-wing groups to watch in 2026

WELFARE STATE WATCH:

• From Minneapolis to “Somaliapolis”: How Incentives Reshaped a City. A Case Study in Welfare, Incentives, and Parallel Society.

• ‘Midtermunition’: Mamdani Is Already Trashing New York to Third-World Status.

• New SNAP Work Requirements, Included In Trump Megabill, Now In Effect

• Sen. James Lankford Goes For Jugular Of $100 Billion In Blue State Unemployment Fraud

ASK YOURSELF THIS QUESTION: WHY ARE REPUBLICANS ALWAYS UNABLE TO OPPOSE AND EVEN MARGINALLY REDUCE THE SIZE OF THE WELFARE STATE? Medicaid fraud and abuse are hitting unthinkable levels.

DEEP STATE WATCH:

• Zombie’ programs given cash to live again!

• Watchdog alleges Netflix coordinated with FBI to promote left-wing narratives

• How Biden and Fauci suppressed the COVID-19 lab-leak theory

• Teaching ferrets to binge drink: Rand Paul’s annual Festivus report finds $1.6 TRILLION in government waste

• Four ways Trump has dismantled the ‘Deep State’ since inauguration

PEOPLE KEEP TALKING ABOUT “THE YOUNG MAN PROBLEM” (AS THEY SHOULD), BUT WE ALSO NEED TO TALK ABOUT “THE YOUNG WOMAN PROBLEM (AS WE SHOULD),” WHICH IS A VERY DIFFERENT KIND OF PROBLEM, BUT A PROBLEM NONETHELESS: Young women are radicalising.

IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES:

THOUGHTS, COMMENTS, REACTION? The Least Laid Generation in History: Gen Z Is Ghosting Sex — and the Implications Are Huge.

LIVING IN HERBERT MARCUSE’S WORLD . . .

THIS IS NOT GOING TO END WELL, AND I DON’T MEAN POLITICALLY. Consider the sociological consequences of this ideological gap between young men and women:

CHINA WATCH:

• China’s Xi Publicly References Recent Military Shake-Up

• Chinese Academics Who Attended Chinese Military-Run Schools Work At US Colleges

• Las Vegas bio lab contained human samples, testing materials, FBI says.

• HOW CHINA CORRUPTS ACADEMIC RESEARCH.

• Dire Strait: Sure Looks Like China Is Writing Off the Ayatollahs.

GREAT BRITAIN WATCH

• This perverse government is a greater threat to the British way of life than Russia.

• British Students Mourn “Beloved” Ayatollah.

• How the Royal Navy shrank to its smallest ‘since English Civil War.’

• Decades in the planning, the Islamic Republic of Britain.

OH CANADA:

• This Canadian Man Is Poor, So the Government Offered to Kill Him. Here’s What Happened.

• Death Cult: Canada Set To Surpass 100,000 Assisted Suicides

• “One out of every 20 deaths in Canada is now caused by the government’s assisted suicide program.”

CIVILIZATIONAL DECLINE AND FALL: Paris wine show reflects surging demand for zero- and low-alcohol drinks.

STONER NATION: 20 Million Americans Say They’re Always High, And Even Liberals Recognize The Craze Has Gone Too Far

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THE UGLY

IS THIS WHERE WE ARE IN 21^ST-CENTURY AMERICA?

• Is Giving Cross-Sex Drugs to Mentally Ill People Resulting in Trans Killers?

• Karol Markowicz: The rise in transgender killers proves that we have a major mental health crisis unfolding.

THEY LIED AND CHILDREN DIED: Parents told daughter would ‘probably die’ without sex change surgery, suit claims

. . . and THE BEAUTIFUL

Thomas Gainsborough. Thomas Gainsborough, Mary, Countess Howe, 1763–64, Oil on canvas, English Heritage, Kenwood House, London. H/T New Criterion

Have a great week!

*I am going to Texas this weekend for nine days, so there will likely be no post from The Redneck Intellectual next week and possibly the week after as well.

DUMB & DUMBER (NO. 127)

K-12 EDITION

WOULD YOU PERMIT YOUR CHILDREN TO ATTEND THESE SCHOOLS? Sixth graders taught ‘binding’ and ‘coming out’ advice in ‘Transgender Week’ lesson

THEY REALLY DO WANT TO …

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* I know I promised a series of essays on marriage (which are still coming in a few weeks), but I’ve been distracted recently thinking about the nature of history. Before you begin reading this essay, stop and ask yourself this simple question: what is history? Think about it for a bit before you start reading. I may do one more essay on history, and then I’ll get to the question of marriage. Hope you enjoy!

I’m making the audio recording to this essay available to all readers with the hope that you’ll think my work worthy of a paid subscription.

This essay is concerned with the nature, meaning, methods, purposes, and possibilities of history. To that end, it is an exercise in the philosophy of history, which begins by addressing three fundamental questions: what is the past, how do we know it, and why does knowledge of the past matter?

Framed in this way, history mirrors the branches of philosophy. It has a metaphysics, an epistemology, and an ethics. The metaphysics of history (i.e., the “what” of history) is concerned with the nature of past reality. The epistemology of history (i.e., the “how” of history) is concerned with the means by which we know or acquire knowledge of the past. The ethics of history (i.e., the “why” of history) is concerned with the meaning of history for the present.

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The Metaphysics of History

I begin with a few general observations on the “what” or what I have called the metaphysics of history. Simply defined, history is the past, or that which occurred in the past through linear time. The past is that which occurred one second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade, century, and millennium ago, and so on for every human who has ever lived. Metaphysically, there is never really a “present” in history, only a past. For the living, the present is a nanosecond half-way house between past and future. In the broadest sense, history is whatever existed and/or happened somewhere in the past from the beginning of time to the always evaporating present.

What are the metaphysical qualities and characteristics that define the past?

First, the past no longer exists; it cannot be observed or experienced firsthand. The past is dead. History is what once was, but now it is gone. There is no eternal return, and no one can relive the past. At best, it exists in memory. Second, the past is unalterable; it cannot be changed. To put a twist on Aristotle’s Law of Identity applied to history, we might say “A was A,” or whatever was, was. As such, the past is metaphysically absolute. There are no re-dos in history. Third, the past—or at least most of the past—is lost to us forever, and our knowledge of the parts which are recoverable is incomplete and imperfect. The full history human existence includes an incalculable number of events for which there is no record, which means that most of human history is inaccessible to us. Finally, the past is and shall always remain a foreign place to us, and its visitors from the present are always strangers in a strange land without the means to fully know and understand the people they study. Their distance from us can never be entirely bridged. We can never fully understand the past.

History has a second and more common definition, which is the study and recording of what happened in the past. The ancient Greek word historia means “inquiry” or “investigation.” Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary defined history as “An account of facts, particularly of facts respecting nations or states; a narration of events in the order in which they happened, with their causes and effects.” In this sense, history is the pursuit of knowledge about what happened in the past, how it happened, and why it happened. In this sense, history is the creation of a social memory of things thought, said, and done. As such, history is a bridge between past and present. Events—human events—are a consequence of human action, and human action is the result of human thought. In a sense, then, as R. G. Collingwood once put it, “All history is the history of thought”—but that does not make history the same as philosophy. History is related to philosophy, but it is not the same thing. History is the study of what, how, and why humans thought in the past and the relationship of that thought to the what, how, and why of their actions. Thought and action are mediated by choice.

Ever since Herodotus, history has become a form of knowledge and a recognized field of study. History is the study of past human affairs, but those affairs are not static; they are always moving forward in time. Those who study the past are historians. Historians enter the portal of history, transport themselves in their imaginations to a particular time in the past, and then follow their subjects as they move forward in time to an end point. We might say that the “doing” of history is the study of change over time, which begins and ends at a point or time in past. As such, history requires a forward-moving narrative that takes readers from point A to Z. It studies the cause-and-effect relationships between human thought and action in time and across space and between actors in the past.

History comes in many shapes and forms. It is the most comprehensive form of knowledge because it studies what people think and do, which means that its potential topics are virtually endless. As such, the study or field of history can be as broad as the full panoply of human thought and action. Amongst the most common or prominent forms of history are social, demographic, cultural, political, constitutional, administrative, legal, diplomatic, military, economic, literary, medical, and intellectual history to name the most prominent.

The first challenge of history writing is a recognition the object of one’s study no longer exists. The historian’s job is to bring back to life, at least figuratively and artistically, that which is dead. The doing of history is the re-creation of a remembered or discovered past. Initially, the doing of history was concerned with recollection and retelling. This is what Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey do. Later, the doing of history—certainly modern history—became an act of discovery and re-enactment, that is, the act of discovering something unknown, lost, or forgotten, and the re-enactment of it for the sake of others. Most often, this knowledge is captured in the form of a book, essay, film, or documentary.

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The Epistemology of History

Let us turn now to the “how” or what I have called the epistemology of history. The question we must now ask is, how can we know the past? How can we in the present know the what, how, and why of past thought and action?

The study of history, like philosophy, begins with a sense of wonder and curiosity. A good historian, as with Socrates, begins with the recognition of his or her own ignorance about a past event and then pursues some kind of explanatory knowledge about it by doing historical research. The doing or making of history is a mode of thinking that requires the discovery and re-enactment (usually in the form of a written narrative) of past events. Put differently, the study of history is a search for the truth—the objective truth or something approximating it—as it relates to events that happened in the past. As such, history is a form of knowledge. The “doing” of history—by which I mean the researching, studying, and writing of history—is the work of a historian. Historians want to know what happened relative to some event in the past, when and where it happened, how it happened, why it happened, what its consequences were, and what its meaning was for the people who experienced the event and for future generations. Knowing the truth about the past, however, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, is difficult.

We enter and arrive at some point in the past as though pilgrims on a journey to a foreign land. The historian’s goal is to recover what once was and as it was. But the question is, how do we get from the present to a past that is dead to us? How do we get to a time that no longer exists? What is our portal to the past? In other words, how do historians discover and re-create the past for the present and future?

Our entry point to the past typically begins by reading the histories of historians already written, but our question is how did those historians discover and recreate the past? One thing is certain: we cannot know the past beyond our own lives through direct, empirical perception. We cannot be eyewitnesses to the events we wish to know. Those in the present can only know the past if those who lived it left behind some kind of record of their lives. The historian’s knowledge of the past is therefore always second-hand and is mediated by the nature and availability of the historical evidence, most often in the form of written documents (e.g., books, pamphlets, essays, speeches, newspapers, resolutions, petitions, declarations, laws, decrees, diaries, autobiographies, correspondence, court records, wills, deeds, notes of transaction, contracts, etc.), oral traditions, or various other relics from the time.

The historian’s business is to discover and reconstruct the events that brought the evidence into being, as well as the causes of those events and the consequences that issued from them. There is no history if there is no extant evidence. Historians must not make claims about the past that are not supported by the evidence or historical record. For these reasons and more, the historian must therefore begin with a degree epistemological modesty.

Doing history requires thinking historically, which means the recovery of past thought and action, not as a static snapshot, but as a moving picture that involves cause-and-effect relationships between many actors. The historian’s craft involves discovery, collection, selection, distillation, synthesis, organization, interpretation, and narrative. The process is inductive. It means drawing generalizations based on countless particulars. History is a mode of thinking that requires separating the wheat from the chaff. Historians typically examine large numbers of documents in their research, often numbering in the hundreds or more, which might not necessarily have obvious connections to one another. The historian must choose, select, and rank by causal importance the evidence that he or she has collected. Much historical research and writing involves a process of elimination. This means that the historian’s craft is concerned, first and foremost, with choice, selection, and recreation, which means ranking hierarchically what is and is not important for the subject and story. The historian must also make sense of contradictions in the historical record and chart a causal explanation for what happened.

Historians investigating the past typically begin by examining external events (i.e., the effects, by which I mean the actions of individuals doing things), and then seek to discover the internal events (i.e., the causes, by which I mean the thinking, ideas, and choices of individuals). Let’s consider two examples. We know for instance, that John Adams delivered a speech in the Continental Congress on July 1, 1776, and we know that George Washington crossed the Delaware River on December 25, 1776. Knowing that they did these things is not enough. The historian seeks to discover the context, motivations, ideas and thinking processes that led Adams and Washington to do what they did. We want to know, for instance, what Adams said, how he said it, and why he said it. Likewise, we want to know Washington’s strategic thinking and decision-making that led him to lead his troops across an icy river at night in the middle of the winter. Why did he and his troops cross the Delaware when and where he did? What were the causes and consequences of both events, and how are both events related?

Historians, as opposed to annalists or philosophers, are never concerned with just external actions or internal thoughts to exclusion of the other because thought and action are inextricably connected for the historian in a dynamic relationship. The goal of the historian is not simply to re-present an event, but rather to explain its causes and consequences as well as its character and meaning. The “what” must be explained by the “how” and the “why.” We know about Adams’s speech and Washington’s journey, for instance, primarily through the private correspondence of those who participated in or were witnesses to them. Historians also know about these events via diaries, newspaper articles, and the records of the Continental Congress. Historians and students of history want to know what caused these events and what their consequences were.

Historians reconstruct the past according to an explanatory generalization, narrative, and a theme that are the result of piecing together many parts into a whole. After collecting, sorting, collating, organizing, and trying to make sense of a vast array of evidence, the historian then re-enacts the past in his own mind, which means to forge a narrative and explanation about what happened and the meaning of what happened. The historian’s task is to examine how the parts fit together to create a narrative of the past. At this point, the historian’s craft becomes an art. Thinking historically means dealing in generalizations, which requires seeing connections and bringing them together in a coherent whole.

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The Ethics of History

We turn now to the “why” of history, or what I have called the ethics of history. The first task and primary purpose of those who “do” history (i.e., the work of historians) is to pursue the truth about the past, and the primary purpose of those who study and teach history is, at least in part, to help make sense of the world in which we live by studying the movement from the past to the present. The past only has meaning in the present. Our concern in this third section is with the latter—with those who study and teach history.

Having come this far, we are compelled to ask, why do we study history? What is its value to us? What do we hope to get from it? Specifically, why do we in the present want to know the “what,” “how,” and “why” of the past if life always moves forward? To paraphrase Hillary Clinton, what difference does it make? Viewed critically, isn’t the past an anchor on our lives? Do we need history to live in the present? Alternatively, what happens to us if we’re liberated from our past? Why have all civilizations recorded their pasts in one way or another? Do we become unwitting slaves to it, or is knowledge of the past liberating? Not to be trite, but George Santayana’s now hackneyed line, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” should be offset by Gordon S. Wood’s riposte, “Those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it!”

Before I go further, I should say that I am not concerned here to examine if there is purpose—particularly moral purpose—in history, or if there are purposes in the historical process. It is not my goal to determine whether some kind of internal necessity is built into the metaphysics of history, or whether history is deterministically cyclical, moves in a straight line of progress, or is dialectical. That would require us to discover and reveal largely unseen meta-forces impelling and directing the past into the present and future. This is a large and difficult topic beyond the purview of this paper. Nor am I here to say that history is simply one damn thing after another. Instead, my aim focuses on a narrower question: what public purpose is to be served by the study of history? Of this much, I am certain: history is not and should not be an exercise in dilettantish antiquarianism or idle curiosity. The study, writing, and teaching of history serves a practical moral purpose for individuals and society, which is captured in this question: why do we want our children to be taught history? In fact, why do we engage in culture wars over the history that is taught to our children? The answer is simple: history matters, and it has always mattered.

History often begins as an exercise in self-knowledge both for individuals and for communities. It grows out a deep and abiding longing in the human soul to know where we came from. All of us are the products of our past, and history helps us to understand who and what we are. We are all curious about our origin story. Our cultural manners and mores and the forms and formalities of our political institutions are imprinted with the historical DNA of our national origins. Historical self-knowledge is therefore the first step to self-improvement both as individuals and as communities. From our study of the past, we can try to figure out how to be better in the present and future. We use the lamp of experience and history to illuminate the present and to guide us on our journey forward.

History can also teach us many other things about the human condition. For instance, it can teach us about: 1) human nature, particularly the role that reason and the passions play in our lives; 2) the role of perspective and time in human life (including death); 3) the role of cause and effect in human action; 4) the role of intended and unintended consequences in our lives; 5) the limitations and possibilities of life; 6) right and wrong, just and unjust, and good and bad; 7) heroism and villainy; and 7) what it means to love and honor the best or highest things.

History thus serves us as a kind of moral laboratory, not the kind where we do live experiments, but the kind where we can observe the nature of man under certain conditions, and the causes and consequences of human thought and action. Through the laboratory of history, we can test our theories about how to live in the present through the observation of how people lived in the past. The past is a testing ground where we can exercise and practice our moral reasoning and judgment. Through a study of history, we can observe virtue and vice, heroism and villainy, and success and failure. The pedagogic value of history is that we can there see the good, the bad, and the ugly and learn from them. We can see what ideas and actions did and did not work.

In these ways and more, I would like to suggest that a knowledge of history is a precondition for wisdom, and wisdom is a cardinal virtue, if not the architectonic virtue. To know where we have been helps us to know where we are, and both guide us in knowing where to go. In this way, history is a necessary partner of moral philosophy. They go hand in hand. Most of us are familiar with Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke’s 1735 statement in his Letters on the Study and Use of History, where he famously wrote, “History is philosophy teaching by examples.” By philosophy, Bolingbroke clearly meant moral philosophy.

Originally, the teaching of history to children was conceived as a form of moral instruction by which we teach children the what, how, and why of living free, just, and honorable lives. History and philosophy complement one another: history grounds abstract thought in lived reality, while philosophy draws upon and elevates experiences into timeless wisdom. They are two sides of the same coin: one moves from the general to the particular (i.e., philosophy teaching by examples), and the other from the particular to the general (i.e., history teaching by principles).

Lastly, I’d like to note that history as self-knowledge includes not only our lives as individuals but is most often defined as the self-knowledge of political communities. The goal is to create social memories of who we are and where we came from, and we typically do this to define who and what we are as a people or community. Conceived in this way, history is a social adhesive or a moral glue holding society together, and it is a source of wisdom from which we can draw to help solve the challenges of the present.

History also serves to induce patriotism, rightly understood. This is how history has been taught in virtually every human culture or nation from the beginning of time. If, as Americans, we believe that the United States is a good if not a remarkable country that has given us unique freedoms and opportunities to live and pursue our highest aspirations, then it behooves us to understand and show our appreciation for previous generations who built this nation. All that we have—our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, our political institutions, our unique and diverse manners and mores, our cities, our manufacturing plants, our hospitals, our universities, our libraries, our rockets, our music and literature, and, most of all, our freedoms—was created for us by someone else. To those who dedicated their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to building and defending a free society we surely owe something in the form of gratitude. This is why we celebrate July 4^th or Memorial Day, and this is one important reason why we study our national past. There is nothing wrong with love of country, particularly if that country is uniquely good. Taught in this way, history is the principal vehicle by which to promote principled patriotism and enlightened citizenship. “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816, “it expects what never was and never will be.”

Alternatively, we can teach the history of our past, as we mostly do now, by focusing not on the good but on the bad and ugly of American history. Those who believe that the United States of America is an inherently wicked nation will no doubt tell a different kind of story about America’s past. And of course, the question is: what story of America’s past will be told to the children? Given a choice, would you want America’s children to be taught the good, the bad, or the ugly of American history, particularly if the goal—and I can’t imagine anyone objecting to this goal—is to encourage them to be virtuous citizens of a free society and the very best that they can be as individuals? Do we want to teach our children to love or hate their history and ultimately themselves. Is it wise or nihilistic to teach children to hate their past and their ancestors’ past? These are serious questions in the year of America’s semiquincentennial.

In my view, there is a time and place for everything including the bad and the ugly, but when we’re talking about children, we must consider their psychological and moral needs. To teach children to resent and hate the past of their forefathers is, in my view, a form of cognitive child abuse. It creates crooked souls. The best kind of history for children is one that fires their imaginations and their ambitions with the hope of possibilities yet attained. Young people have a deep and abiding need to see and experience adventure, greatness and heroes. This is what they want and need. If given a choice, I’m willing to bet that the kids want to learn about the best and not the worst of which men and women are capable.

* I have reluctantly decided to temporarily halt my ongoing series of essays on the selfishness/selflessness problem. I have a few essays that I’d still like to write, but I simply don’t have the bandwidth right now to work on them. I will return to the series at some point in the near future. Promise.

**That said, I’m hoping to launch a new series of essays in the weeks ahead on the topic of marriage. I’m hearing a lot of talk right now that the Supreme Court may take up a case challenging the Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision on same-sex marriage.

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THE GOOD

OPENING AMERICA’S CONTINENTAL INTERIOR CAUSED A QUANTUM LEAP IN COMMERCE AND EMIGRATION TO THE TRANS-APPALACHIAN WEST: 200 YEARS AGO, THE ERIE CANAL OPENED AND AMERICA WAS NEVER THE SAME:

LESS (TAXATION) + LESS (REGULATION) + LESS (WELFARE) = BOOMING ECONOMY: America Is The World’s Hottest Economy.

I’M A PEACE-LOVING MAN AND DON’T LIKE WAR, BUT I ALSO KNOW THAT IT’S SOMETIMES NECESSARY. I also prefer that the good guys win in a world of bad guys. Ergo, it’s best to be prepared: The Coming Revolution in Warfare

MRS. REDNECK SAYS SHE’S GOING TO ORDER ONE FOR ME: Ancient practice of blowing through a conch shell could help treat dangerous snoring condition.

TAKE A STROLL THROUGH A CENTURY PLUS WORTH OF COMMERCIAL FLIGHT. Pretty cool: 15 fascinating photos of flying through the decades.

NOT MY IDEA OF A VACATION, BUT I’M IMPRESSED BY IT AS A TECHNOLOGICAL MARVEL: World’s largest cruise ship sets sail as industry nears record-breaking highs

MEDICINE/HEALTH ROUND-UP

• Vitamin D May Help Slow Aging, Study Finds.

• Heart Attacks May Be Infectious and Vaccines Could Prevent Them.

• This Over-the-Counter Vitamin B3 Supplement May Help Prevent Skin Cancer.

• Elon Musk’s Neuralink plans brain implant trial for speech impairments.

• A single blood test can measure how different parts of our bodies are aging.

• A 100-Year-Old Problem Solved? Scientists Discover How To Freeze Organs Without Cracking Them.

THERE ARE LAWS OF NATURE AND THEY ARE EVERYWHERE. MOREOVER, THEY CAN BE DISCOVERED AND UNDERSTOOD: Is life a form of computation?

NEWS YOU CAN USE: What happened before the Big Bang? Computational method may provide answers.

THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE LIVES! How to sail across the Indian Ocean: Everything you need to know.

OFF TO THE GYM I GO: Scientists Say Exercise May Actually Reverse Your Biological Age.

ARCHEOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGY ROUNDUP

• Massive New Map Reveals 300,000 Km of Ancient Roman Roads.

• Roman warriors found stacked in ancient well suffered ‘humiliating’ fate after battle

• Metal detectorist uncovers gold ring linked to one of history’s most infamous plots

• Wisconsin lake reveals ancient vessels that predate Egyptian pyramids

• The cave where it happened: Denisova cavern’s congress of ancient peoples.

PROGRESS: Scientists sound alarm on DEI’s threat to academic freedom at ‘War on Science’ event.

WAS GEORGE WASHINGTON A FASCIST? We read history books we do not eat them.

ANYONE WITH THE SLIGHTEST AMOUNT OF REFINEMENT, TASTE, AND CULTURE KNOWS THAT SCOTTISH MEN SWEAR. That’s just a fact. Refinement, taste, and culture come with being culturally sensitive to cultural differences. Anyway, that’s my weak attempt at apologizing for all the swearing in this important video commentary. Disney’s Self-Inflicted “Boy Trouble”

SCIENCE ROUNDUP:

• Study shows evidence of habitable conditions on Saturn moon.

• It’s Official: Scientists Confirmed What Is Inside Our Moon.

• New Study Suggests Early Mars Hosted Conditions Suitable for Life.

• Scientists extract viable RNA from woolly mammoth remains.

• Kissing started 20 million years ago, long before humans existed.

LET’S HOPE SO, BUT I’M NOT HOLDING MY BREATH: Is This Finally the Dawning of the End of the Woke Corporate Era?

IT ALL STARTS WITH A SIMPLE QUESTION: WHAT IS MARRIAGE? Judge makes significant ruling for schools on ‘children’s book promoting same-sex marriage’

HEAL THYSELF: ‘The world is waking up’: Surveys show trans identification in ‘free-fall’ among young people

MORAL PROGRESS IN THE STATE THAT ONCE HANGED MEN AND WOMEN FOR BEING WITCHES: Health Centers In Massachusetts Suspend Transgender Care For Minors

EXCELLENT ESSAY FROM ROGER KIMBALL ON THE ALLEGED EVILS OF CAPITALISM: Capitalism’s critics cling to a mythic past, but the record shows the factory age ignited rising living standards, broader opportunity, and the modern prosperity we now take for granted.

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THE BAD

YES, IT’S REALLY THAT BAD: Top 20 Insanities DOGE revealed in 2025.

COMING TO A BLUE CITY NEAR YOU: 16 Dead in NYC From Warmth of Collectivism.

WE ALL KNEW THAT MARGARET THATCHER WAS RIGHT . . . THEY’RE ONLY JUST ADMITTING IT 40 YEARS LATER: German Chancellor Admits That Welfare State Is Running Out of Other People’s Money.

CALIFORNIA TURNED INTO ZIMBABWE SO SLOWLY THAT NO ONE NOTICED: ‘Stolen Land’: Gavin Newsom’s ‘Agricultural Equity’ Advisers Prepare Plan To Redistribute Farmland to Racial Minorities. California has ‘the responsibility’ to help ‘rebuild the wealth that was stolen,’ task force says.

PORTLAND TURNED INTO CALIFORNIA SO SLOWLY THAT NO ONE NOTICED: Reactionary, Neo-Confederate Portland.

UK WATCH:

• Londonistan and the Death of Tolerance.

• You Can’t Make This Up: UK Theater Cancels Showing of Free Speech Documentary.

• Britain’s Plan to Abolish Most Jury Trials Should Make Us Grateful for the Constitution.

PRETTY SURE THAT DOESN’T SOUND GOOD: Deep Beneath The Pacific Ocean, Earth’s Crust Is Tearing Itself Apart.

BETTER GET A PARKA: Climate scientists’ controversial claim Gulf Stream could be near collapse — predicting a new ice age.

I LIKE “NICE” BUT NOT SUICIDAL EMPATHY. They’re not the same thing: American civilization is being destroyed from within by the ‘Republic of Nice’

CULTURAL SEPPUKU: German Christmas market installs ‘anti-tank’ barriers meant to stop invading armies, public media cheers ‘creative’ solution.

CHINA WATCH:

• China’s Engineering State

• Three Chinese scholars at UMich charged with conspiring to smuggle biological materials into U.S.

• US Nuclear Bomber Base Shares Fence With Trailer Park Tied To Chinese Intel-Linked Fraudster

• China’s 1st reusable rocket test fires engines ahead of debut flight.

• How China Raced Ahead of the U.S. on Nuclear Power.

THIS MAY BE THE GREATEST SCANDAL OF OUR LIFETIMES: New Docs Show More Connections Between Wuhan Lab and U.S. Intelligence.

BUILT INTO THE WELFARE STATE IS A BOTTOMLESS HOLE OF CORRUPTION:

• Watchdog Warns Of Hundreds Of Millions In Medicaid Payments To Deceased Enrollees

• US Government Awards Nearly $200M In Health-Related Grants To Help Illegals

LIKE ALL WELFARE, USAID IS A FRAUD: Lies, Damn Lies, and USAID Lies.

THE PLAGUE COMES IN MANY DIFFERENT FORMS: The Death Rattle of Apocalyptic Environmentalism.

SOMETHING IS HAPPENING: Can the ‘Lost Generation’ be found?

• Related: Feminism Burned Down the Home—Now the West Is Shivering in the Dark

THIS IS WHAT IT’S COME TO. Turns out, the needs of young men—the so-called “Lost Generation”—are pretty simple: they want a wife, kids, a job, and a little respect every now and then. Is that too much to ask?

YOU DON’T WANT THIS, AND YET YOU SEEM POWERLESS TO STOP IT: How Islam Caused — and Is Again Causing — a Dark Age in Europe.

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THE UGLY

FOLLOW THE SCIENCE THEY SAID, BUT WHAT THEY GAVE US WAS QUACK SCIENCE AND QUACK MEDICINE: Did Dr. Spock’s parenting advice kill 60,000 babies?

THE DEEP STATE IS YOUR FRIEND—NOT! KASH PATEL DROPS COVID ORIGIN BOMBSHELL:

YES, IT WORKS SOMETHING LIKE THIS: The Left-Wing Terror Memeplex

I’LL BET YOU NEVER KNEW THIS WAS HAPPENING TO YOUR NATION AND TO YOUR CHILDREN: FBI Sees Dramatic Increase In Arrests Of ‘Nihilistic Violent Extremism,’ Individuals Targeting Children. There is a lot more to this story about which we need answers. For instance, we need to know more about the backgrounds of these of these two characters. Are they recent immigrants to this country? Did they go to university in the United States? If yes, which ones?

. . . and THE BEAUTIFUL

HERE IS ERNEST BARRIAS’S (1841-1905) stunningly beautiful polychromatic marble sculpture La Nature se dévoilant devant la Science (”Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science”), which was commissioned in 1889 to decorate the new Faculty of Medicine in Bordeaux. H/T to Kelsie Rose for bringing Barrias and his La Nature se dévoilant devant la Science to my attention.

Have a great week!

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DUMB AND DUMBER (NO. 125)

K-12 EDITION

CORRUPT FROM TOP TO BOTTOM: Bombshell: Defending Ed Drops National Education Association Docs Detailing Radical LGBTQ Agenda.

THIS IS MIND NUMBINGLY BAD. #Just_Walk_Away: It’s now up to U.S. Supreme Court whether students can be forcibly indoctrinated with Islam

IF YOU LOVE YOUR CHILDREN, YOU MUST DO EVERYTHING IN YOUR POWER TO PREVENT THEM FROM RECEIVING THIS KIND OF RADICAL INDOCTRINATION. Ultimately, your only real choice is to #Just_Walk_Away: Top teachers union in hot water after unearthed training docs reveal radical plan

IF THERE ARE GOING TO BE GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS, THEN THEY SHOULD AT LEAST TEACH THE TRUTH ABOUT COMMUNISM: Florida OKs Plan To Teach Dangers Of Communism In K-12

YOU CAN ONLY PUSH ORDINARY PEOPLE AROUND SO MUCH BEFORE THEY REVOLT: Father furious after discovering state’s invasive sex survey for 11-year-olds

WE NEED IT NOW MORE THAN EVER: Classical liberal education: Scarce, embattled, essential

HERE WE GO AGAIN: Teacher with 8-week-old baby pleads guilty to having sex with her student, 15.

THIS IS JUST THE SURFACE LEVEL OF HOW BAD THINGS REALLY ARE: The Ideological Erosion of College Readiness.

ENDORSED: Why Marxism needs to be purged from our classrooms.

HIGHER ED EDITION

YOU SHOULD NOT THINK OF THIS AS THE EXCEPTION; IT’S THE RULE IN AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION. The rule may not apply in exactly this form around the country, but the underlying premise of the course is everywhere: University of Utah class explores ‘Black Trans Lesbian Marxists’ and radical literature.

GEE, WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CLUE? Americans are rightly waking up — much of higher education is now a scam.

THIS IS A SERIOUS PROBLEM. The government schools and the colleges have turned our children into sniveling brats : Nine in ten college students think ‘words can be violence’: survey.

WHY IS KENT STATE A SEGREGATIONIST UNIVERSITY? Kent State a cappella group bans white students from solo auditions.

MUST READ: The Political Causes of Higher Education’s Decline

DEFUND THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: What Could Possibly Go Wrong? University of MN Labels Whiteness a ‘Pandemic,’ Demands ‘Re-Education’.

WHAT’S WORSE IS THAT AMERICA’S UNIVERSITIES HAVE NO CLUE ABOUT HOW TO MAKE THEMSELVES RELEVANT AGAIN OR WORTH THE INVESTMENT: Poll: Majority says 4-year college degrees ‘not worth the investment’

THERE WILL BE MORE OF THIS—PROMISE: University of Delaware student arrested, police say he had machine gun and a plan to attack campus.

THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO THINK THIS WAY IN MOST AMERICAN ENGLISH DEPARTMENTS: Loyola Maryland English dept. says literature built on ‘white supremacy,’ may rename program.

TIP OF THE ICEBERG: Auburn University admissions officer facing allegations of race-based hiring resigns.

SUE AND SUE BIGLY: University of Utah student suspended for exposing professor’s history of anti-white racism.

PROFESSIONAL EDUCATION EDITION

AMERICA’S LAW SCHOOLS ARE ABOUT AS INTELLECTUAL CORRUPT AS A TYPICAL UNDERGRADUATE DEPARTMENT IN THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES: The Long Game in the Legal Academy.

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*What follows are a few observations and thoughts from a trip I took last week to give a talk at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. I started writing as events were unfolding in real time.

**The audio version is at the end for paid subscribers.

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Thursday, January 15, 2026:

I’m writing this essay at 36,000 feet on a flight from Atlanta to Kansas City. I had no intention of writing this essay when I boarded the plane, but sometimes life happens.

Something happened to me today that has both shaken me to the core and left me thinking about the nature of joy and suffering. I have nothing profound or important to say other than to share my experience with you and a few thoughts to go with it.

At the Atlanta airport this morning, I watched a middle-aged mother and father board our plane to Kansas City with their severely disabled son. As it was, father, son, and mother sat in the row directly right in front of me. The parents were in their mid-fifties and the son seemed to be in his mid-twenties. As far as I could tell, the son was a quadriplegic, non-verbal, and breathed through oxygen tubes. The mother sat by the window, the father in the aisle seat, and the son in the middle. I was sitting in the aisle seat behind them, so I could partially see the young man through the gap between his seat and his father’s.

Just after we took off, the son’s assisted breathing, which was clearly audible to me, became fast, heavy, and hard. During a moment of particularly turbulent breathing, I saw the mother reach for her son’s hand, and almost immediately his breathing slowed and softened. A simple touch of a mother’s hand lowered the son’s anxiety. Occasionally, the father would take a cloth and gently wipe his son’s brow, which was glistening with perspiration undoubtedly because of the heat generated by his heavy breathing. It seemed as though the son was using all his energy and strength just to breath.

I will admit to you that I was pained—deeply—by the whole scene. Never in my life have I witnessed a scene so tender, loving, and tragic. My sense of the son’s condition is that it was not the result of accident but was congenital. I suspect he has cerebral palsy.

My first thought was that what I had just witnessed as we were boarding and as I was now experiencing on the plane was part of a process that had begun hours earlier in the darkness of the early morning when this family awoke to begin their day’s journey. I imagined what it would have taken for these parents to gently pull their son out of his bed, dress and feed him, put him in their vehicle, drive to the airport, get him to the terminal and through security, get on the plane, fly for two-and-a-half hours constantly caring for his wellbeing, get off the plane, and then reverse the whole process for the rest of the day. Just one day in their lives would exhaust anyone.

It then occurred to me that these two loving parents had done some variation of what they were doing today every single day for the last 25 years or so. In other words, the parents had done some version of today for approximately the last 9,125 days. All this struck me like a thunderbolt. Frankly, the moment was emotionally overwhelming.

I then asked of myself the obvious question: could I do what these parents are doing? Could I do what they have done for 25 years. Could I do what they have done and are now doing for the rest of my life as they will be doing for the rest of their lives? Could I love and care for a child and then an adult child incapable of caring for him- or herself? It would surely mean that all that I have done in my life and loved doing, I almost certainly would not and could not have done. My life would have been radically different. My wife and I would have had to spend every single day of our lives thinking and worrying about and caring for our helpless child. Would my marriage have survived? God forbid, would I have abandoned my child to institutional care as have many parents?

After thinking through what it would mean to have a child with a severe disability, I recalled that moment when each my three (now adult) children were born. I don’t mean to speak for all fathers, but I suspect many have done some version of what I did. Each time a nurse put one of those helpless babies in my arms, I welled up with emotion, my eyes filling with tears, and I whispered to each one my children these words: “I will love you, and I will care for you, and I will protect you every day for the rest of my life.” And when I said it, I meant it. I meant it more than anything I had ever said in my life before. Other than my wedding vows, never have I said words that I meant with such ferocious intensity and commitment. I meant those words so much that they hurt—hard. In each of those three successive moments, I became a different person. Something about me was different and better than before. And now, 30, 28, and 26 years later, I can still feel the remnants of an emotion that will never leave me.

In those three moments and with those simple words, I experienced the obvious emotion of life-altering joy. The joy I felt each time was that all-too-human joy knowing that my wife and I had created new life, that my wife (the one who had once thought she might not want to have children) had carried and brought into the world three beautiful babies. Like all parents, I felt the earth-shattering joy that I was holding in my arms each time the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I felt the joy that I was now a father. I felt the joy that we would now be a family. I felt the joy that we would live and love together for the rest of our lives. Nothing in my life has or ever will be better than the three times I held those babies in my arms for the first time.

But I must also tell you that in that in each of those life-altering moments, I also experienced two other emotions very different from joy: anger and fear.

I felt anger because in an instant, when I made that pledge to each of my babies, I knew that my life would never be the same again. I knew that I had taken on a new role in life. As a father, I was now a protector and everything that entails. I knew that from that point forward my only real job in life was to protect my wife and children. But to be a protector assumes that there are forces in the world from which your children must be protected. As I write these words, I am reminded of that line from Cormack McCarthy’s novel The Road, when the father says to his son (which I paraphrase from memory), “if they touch you, I’ll kill them, because that’s my job.” When I first held each of my children in my arms, I didn’t say exactly those words to them or to myself, but they do express near perfectly what I felt in those three moments, and what I still feel today. (And I’m blessed now to feel the very same thing about my grandchildren.)

Make no mistake about it: that is my job—to protect and care for my children. No human law could stop me from doing whatever it took to keep them safe. I knew that instantaneously when I held each of my babies for the first time. There is something deeply primal that happens when a young man becomes a father (something that is and must be otherwise buried deep in one’s consciousness because of its ferocity), and I’m sure something similarly primal happens (but perhaps in a different way) to a young woman when she becomes a mother. I will also tell you that in that moment when I said those words to each of my babies and then in a millisecond experienced first joy and then anger, I felt something that scared me—something so powerful knowing I could live out McCarthy’s words (without hesitation or remorse) in order to protect my children.

But in each of the three most important moments of my life, I also felt a third emotion: a tinge of fear. The fear that any one of my children could suffer some unexpected malady beyond my ability to protect them that would change the course of their lives and mine. The ominous threat of a life-altering illness or accident is always lurking in the back of a parent’s mind. We fear the hand of fortune and tragedy. Suffering does not define the human condition, but we all know that fortune is a harsh mistress whose presence lurks in the dark corners of life. It’s an omnipresent force that we can never entirely shake. We all know that we will all, at some point in our lives, suffer the loss of loved ones. We can’t escape the pain and suffering that inevitably defines the human condition.

But for the grace of God (idiomatically speaking), I have not faced such tragedy, but I know the possibility is always there. In many ways, the emotion of fear is much more present in a parent’s life. Life is full of unexpected tragedy, and parents live in quiet fear for their children and for themselves. Tragedy is not man’s natural condition, but the possibility is always there, and parents fear it. Our radar is always on high alert with our children, particularly when they are young. We fear a toddler walking onto a busy street, we fear the sixteen-year-old who goes out at night with a car, and we fear the possibility of a child being diagnosed with cancer or some other life-threatening disease.

So, could I be as brave and loving as the two parents sitting in the row in front me?

I don’t know. I’d like to think so. To these two parents whom I don’t know and their son, I say thank you. Thank you for reminding me of the words I whispered to my children on the days they were born. Thank you for filling my eyes today with the same tears of joy, anger, and fear.

Sometimes it’s good to feel alive.

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*** Addendum.

Friday, January 16:

There is a sad addendum to my travels.

On my way home from Kansas, I had a two-hour layover in Atlanta. Sitting directly across from me was a slightly younger family than I had seen the day before: a mother and father in their late thirties, and what looked to be a ten-year-old girl in a wheelchair. The girl seemed to have little control of her arms and legs, and her fingers and wrists were curled and bent toward her forearms. The girl, who didn’t seem to have full control of her neck muscles either, would sit up for a few minutes and then slump over at the waist and her head would fall almost into her lap. She had the body control of a rag doll. The sitting up and then slumping over went on for almost an hour.

During that entire time, her parents, who were sitting to one side of her, said nothing to their daughter; indeed, they didn’t even bother look at her—not once! Instead, their own heads were bowed as they doom scrolled on their phones. Their daughter might as well have been sitting by herself without her parents, without anyone, lost in a sea of strangers. In that moment, I saw a girl with no one to love, care, or protect her. My anger mounted, but I felt helpless to do anything with her parents sitting right there. Eventually, an older woman, probably a grandmother, sat down beside the girl and gently put her granddaughters head on her shoulder to rest. And still the parents do nothing! At that moment, I felt nothing but an overwhelming sadness for this girl and total contempt for her parents.

As if her afflictions weren’t enough, this young girl seemingly does not have parents who love her enough to shoulder her suffering.

Sometimes it feels rotten to be alive!

***Second Addendum:

My last flight was moved to a different gate. I made my way to a new seat. I sat down beside a young man, probably in his late twenties. A few minutes later his equally young wife approached and dropped a beautiful baby boy on dad’s lap. This little baby boy squealed with delight. Dad immediately started bouncing his son on his thighs and Eskimo kissing this little baby boy. This is life as it should be.

Let us all “suffer the little children” to come into our lives with a love that is at once tender and ferocious.

Our children—all children—must know that life is beautiful. They deserve nothing less.

Have a great week!

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***The audio file for this essay is at the bottom.

“I swear by Christ—the greatest socialist in history.”—Hugo Chavez, Second Inauguration Speech, 2007

“Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.”—Mikhail Gorbachev, Daily Telegraph, 1992

This essay, along with the two previous essays (“Communism as Christian Heresy” and “The Death of God and the Birth of Socialism”), is an attempt to understand how and why so many Christians are or have become socialists over the course of the last century and a half. To repeat: this is simply a fact—a demonstrable fact that cannot and must not be evaded by those Christians who consider themselves to be politically conservative, libertarian, or classical liberal. More to the point, the important question that must be answered by conservative Christians is: what is the moral foundation of socialism and does that foundation have anything to do with Christianity?

Everything depends upon how we answer this question.

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ON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS FROM COMMUNISM TO CHRISTIANITY

Consider another observable fact: the Christian convert to socialism and communism almost always begins with residual guilt toward the poor and resentment toward the wealthy that he or she was taught as a child in Sunday school. Exploiting Christian guilt is the specialty of the Left.

This fact more than any other explains why Republicans so often support the welfare State. Last year, Georgia Lieutenant Governor and Republican, Geoff Duncan, switched parties because, as he said, his Christian belief to love his neighbor was better achieved by supporting the policies of the socialist welfare State promoted by the Democrats. A decade earlier, former conservative congressman and Ohio Governor, John Kasich, lectured fellow Republicans imploring them to support expanding the welfare State because “when you die and get to the meeting with Saint Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.”

Weaponized guilt—Christian guilt—is and has been the source of the Left’s extraordinary psychological power and political success in advancing their cause. We can clearly see this in Marx’s first great disciple after Engels, Karl Kautsky (1854-1938), often called the “Pope of Marxism,” who demonstrated the ethical connections between Christianity and communism in his influential Foundations of Christianity (1908).

From a communist perspective, according to Kautsky, The Holy Bible’s New Testament teaches pity for the poor and resentment toward the rich. To be clear, both the communist and the Christian typically distinguish between the collective wealth of a nation, which they don’t oppose per se, and differentiating or the relative wealth of individuals, which they do oppose. Both the communist and the Christian would presumably be supportive of all men being wealthy (or all men being poor), but they oppose individuals who are wealthier than others. They would prefer all men to be poor than for some to be rich and some poor, and this is of course the reality in all communist nations throughout history. This means that what they really hate is inequality of wealth, and what they love is equality of wealth. The communist and the Christian assume that all differentiating wealth is the result of theft and exploitation. To be rich therefore is to be unjust, which means wicked. They want all men to be the same: either equally wealthy or equally poor. Differences or inequality are not to be tolerated. This is Kautsky’s major point in the Foundations of Christianity.

To support his claim, Kautsky makes much of the story of Lazarus in the Gospel according to St. Luke, which clearly states that the rich man, simply because he is rich (not because he’s unjust or uncharitable), goes to Hades, while the poor man, Lazarus, is taken by the angels to sit with Abraham in heaven simply because he is poor and suffering. The moral status of neither man is stated. Whether they are deserving of their condition is not stated, but the assumption is that neither is deserving. The rich man does not deserve his wealth, and the poor man does not deserve his poverty. Nothing is said about the rich man being a sinner or the poor man being a saint. In fact, it’s not even stated whether the rich man refused to feed Lazarus or even to allow him to eat scraps from the rich man’s table. Instead, the wealthy man is condemned solely because he is well off, and the poor man is praised simply because he is poor. When the rich man cries out to Abraham for help, he is told: “Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented (16:25).” It is not enough to demand of the wealthy man that he share; no, he must be punished and made to suffer by virtue of his having become wealthy with no concern for how his wealth was created. Nor are we to morally evaluate and judge Lazarus. This is worse than moral relativism. It is the moral inversion of good and bad.

The story of Lazarus is important for Kautsky because it demonstrates the similarity between the Christian and communist evaluations of the poor and rich and the relationship between the two. Both Christian and communist believe that the poor man is good because he is poor, and they believe the rich man is bad because he is rich. What that means, of course, is that the poor man must be rewarded simply because he is poor, and the rich man must be punished simply because he is rich (see Luke 6:20-25; Luke 16:19-25; James 5:1-6). In the twentieth century, Marx’s descendants found a quick and easy way to punish the rich: torture and then kill them.

The question of who can and cannot enter the earthly community being founded by Jesus (“the kingdom of God is at hand,” Mark 1:15) is clear: the poor may enter (see Luke 6:20) and the rich may not, or at least it is hard for them to do so. The only hope that the rich man has to pass through the gates of the New Jerusalem is to give his wealth voluntarily to the poor man. But even then, it may not be enough, for “beside all this, between us [those in heaven] and you [those in Hades] there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence. (Luke 16:26).” This new society will be without socio-economic classes. All men shall be the same or at least relatively similar in terms of wealth.

The last line of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus clearly suggests that the teaching of Jesus would have been approved by “Moses and the prophets (Luke 16:31).” Indeed, the New Testament seems to echo the moral viewpoint of the Old Testament both in what it judges as wicked and praises as good. The alleged or assumed crimes of the wealthy (e.g., violence, fraud, and exploitation) are committed against the poor, the lame, the suffering, the widow, and the orphan who are innocent by virtue of their status (from the Old Testament, see Job 20:10, 18, 19, 24: 3, 6, 10, 11; Psalms 10:2, 14-15, 62:10, 74:19, 82:3-4, 86:1, 94:3, 6, 146:9; Isaiah 5:8, 52:3, 53:9, 58:7-12, 59:2-4, 65:2, 5, 13, 17-18, 25; Jeremiah 5:27-28, 6:6-7; Amos 3:10, 5:7, 11; Micah 2:1-2; and Habakkuk 1:1-3, 14-1). In Psalms 55:11, for instance, the idea of market transactions, which presuppose self-interest, private property, division of labor, competition, trade, and profit, is said to be anathema to a Godly man and a just society, for there “deceit and guile depart not from her streets [i.e., the market place].” In the Psalter, there are over 51 references to either the “poor,” the “needy,” the “lowly,” or the “indigent,” all of whom suffer at the hands of the wicked.

And who are the wicked?

We are told in Psalms that the wicked are those who are rich and who “persecute the poor” and who are “boasteth of his hearts desire, and blesseth the covetous.” The greedy, rich man’s “eyes privily set against the poor. He lieth in wait secretly as a lion in his den: he lieth in wait to catch the poor: he doth catch the poor, when he draweth him into his net (Psalms 10:2-3, 8-9).” The bodies of the greedy rich men are “fat and sleek,” their “pride is their necklace; violence covers them are a garment,” and “they threaten oppression.” These men, says the Psalter, “are the wicked.” They are “always at ease” and they “increase in riches (Psalms 73:3-12).” One is here, of course, reminded of Marx’s discussion of Jews and capitalists in “On the Jewish Question,” where he describes them in morally derogatory terms as “hucksters.”

The Prophets of the Old Testament detest how the rich acquire and accumulate property, which can only be explained by the chicanery, exploitation, abuse, and violence perpetrated by the wealthy on the destitute. The Prophets’ motive in condemning the wealthy is their alleged knowledge of how and why the wealthy have committed an injustice. But the ultimate judgment against the rich is not that they committed a particular crime or sin to gain their wealth, but rather that they simply accumulated one thing after another. The wickedness of the wealthy consists in their having grown rich because they are selfish. And what shall be God’s punishment for the crime of accumulating riches? The answer, which appears first in Isaiah 5:9-1 and then most brutally in Micah 2:3, is annihilation: “Therefore thus saith the LORD; Behold, against this family do I devise an evil, from which ye shall not remove your necks.” The Lord’s Prophets seek to bring into being a society where there are no differences of wealth between men, and this can only come about by eliminating self-interest from human nature and reconstituting it with a moral philosophy of universal self-sacrifice.

But we are still left wondering how the wealthy become rich if they have not lied, cheated, or stolen. What is the nature of their accumulated wealth?

For millennia, the rich have become wealthy because they have sold something for a price either higher than they either paid for it or produced it. In other words, they have made a profit.

And what does the Old Testament say about profit?

In the Book of Isaiah, the Prophet warns the powerful men of Israel who “are greedy dogs which can never have enough” and who “all look to their own way, every one for his gain (56:11). And in Proverbs 1:19 and 15:27, King Solomon says, “So are the ways of every one that is greedy of gain; which taketh away the life of the owners thereof,” and “He that is greedy of gain troubleth his own house.” Profit seeking is morally wicked, according to the Old Testament, because it creates wealth differentiation, and, most importantly, it is motivated by greed or selfishness. This interpretation of the Old Testament is supported by the Church Fathers, including Saint Jerome, who said: “Avarice, the root of all evils, has such a hold on us that we do not consider the mouths of those who come to us, but the hands.”

Likewise, in the Apocryphal Book of Tobit (4:7), Tobit advises his son Tobias to “Give alms of thy goods to all that live justly; and turn not away thy face from any poor man: for so it shall come to pass that the face of the Lord shall not be turned away from thee.” Furthermore, the Old Testament disapproves of profit associated with commerce (Ecclesiasticus 27:1-2) and interest (see Exodus 22:44; Leviticus 25:36, 37, Deuteronomy 23:19, Ezekiel 18:8, 13, 17, 22:12, Psalms 15:15; and Proverbs 28:8).

And in the New Testament (James 5:1-6), wealth qua wealth is cursed for its own sake and condemned with no reason or evidence given to justify the judgment: “Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth. Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter. Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.” Like modern Leftists today, James accuses the wealthy of crimes (e.g., fraud and murder) with no evidence. If—and I repeat if—James’s accusations are nothing more than false accusations (and why should a just person accept them on faith), then what he is really condemning is not only commerce and interest for profit but also production for profit. In other words, the origin of profits and wealth created by production of one kind or another is unjust and therefore immoral.

Later in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells a wealthy ruler he must sell all he has and turn over his wealth to the poor if is to receive eternal life in heaven. The wealthy ruler is not being asked to give some of his wealth to the poor but all of it. This is because, according to Jesus, it is difficult for those who have wealth to “enter into the kingdom of God!” The truth is, according to Jesus, that “it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God (Luke 18:24-25).” Note that the rich man is damned not because he has sinned but simply because he is rich, and the clear suggestion is that differentiating wealth is a sin per se. Otherwise, why condemn it without evidence of a crime?

In the end, Christianity forces men to make a choice: “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon [riches, property, wealth].” (Matthew 6:24)” and of course 1 Timothy famously asserts that “the love of money is the root of all evil (6:10).” In fact, Jesus says that any man who “forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple (Luke:14:33).”

And then of course, there is Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus passes judgment on the poor and the rich:

Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh. . . . But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep (Luke 6:20-25).

Returning to Karl Kautsky, we note that he highlighted these passages (and many more), to demonstrate to the Christians of his time that their principles share common features with those of the communists. He is teaching them that wealth and the enjoyment of one’s wealth are sins and therefore to be condemned, while also teaching them that poverty and suffering are virtues and therefore to be praised. According to Kautsky, the sufferings, deprivations, and humiliations suffered by the poor are thoroughly unmerited. The wealthy (i.e., the bourgeoisie) must therefore atone for their crimes against the poor, while the poor (i.e., the proletariat) shall pass through the needle’s eye on the way to God’s kingdom of eternal bliss.

And how, according to Jesus, can the wealthy seek or receive forgiveness for the sin of being wealthy and assuage their guilt? He tells them to “Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again (Luke 6:30).” Luke’s Jesus then strips men of all judgment, the kind of judgment that might ask how and why some men are wealthy and some are poor. Instead, the wealthy man is commanded to “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven (Luke 6:37).” In other words, it doesn’t matter if the wealthy man made his wealth through rationality, hard work, thrift, honesty, benevolence, and entrepreneurial skill, and nor does it matter if the poor man became poor because of his irrationality, laziness, profligacy, dishonesty, malevolence, and stupor. Such things are not to be known. The rich are sinners just because and the poor are saints just because. We are not to judge the ideas, motives, or actions of men. Instead, we are to accept them simply for what they are, which is good or bad simply based on the status of their wealth.

Not surprisingly, communists such as Kautsky loved Jesus’s teaching. They used it to manipulate and convert Christians to communism, which is precisely what happened starting in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and continued throughout the entirety of the twentieth century and now into the twenty-first. The journey from the poor to the proletariat, from the rich to the bourgeoisie, and from Christian to communist, was neither long nor arduous. Socialism is a guilt-relief program.

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CHRISTIAN COMMUNISM

Communism and Christianity also share a positive moral-political vision, and that vision is self-sacrificial, collectivist, and redistributionist in nature. In the Book of Luke, Jesus describes the terms, conditions and costs of discipleship by enunciating what individuals must sacrifice to be true followers of Christ. First, they must renounce—indeed, “hate”—their fathers, mothers, wives, children, brothers and sisters, and, most of all, they must give up and hate even their own lives (Luke 14:26). The total sacrifice of one’s life and loved ones is at the heart of Christian discipleship. Christian love, particularly as it is explained by St. John, means sacrifice. A disciple must, in the words of Jesus, “whosoever he be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:33),” which means one’s property and loved ones. The followers of Jesus must, above all else, “deny” themselves (Matthew 16:24). In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the “perfect” follower of Jesus must sell his possessions and “give to the poor (Matthew 19:21, Mark 10:25, Luke 18:25).” Self-sacrifice is a Christian’s highest virtue and commandment. The sacrifice of self is a Christian’s highest duty.

Instead of loving people for selfish reasons (i.e., for the happiness and joy they give us), Christians are commanded by Jesus (his “new commandment” beyond God’s original ten) to “love one another (John 13:34),” which means to love indiscriminately as duty and a sacrifice. Christians are commanded to “Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again (Luke 6:30).” Thou shalt giveth and not receiveth. This is the indispensable condition for being a disciple of Christ. Indeed, so radical is Christ’s moral teaching that he commands us to love our enemies:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth . . . Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; . . . Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. (Matthew 5:38, 43-44, 48)

It should be noted that Jesus’s “good tidings” or “good news” are not directed only to his Apostles or to monks in a monastery; instead, he spoke to any man, woman, or child that would listen and follow him. The Apostle Luke tells us that Jesus spoke to the “great multitudes with him.”

In the Old Testament, God speaks through Isaiah not only to the Babylonian exiled Israelites but to all men everywhere when he says, “Come buy wine and milk without money and without price.” This vision of a good society is replicated in Marx’s communist society. Marx envisioned an entirely marketless society controlled and directed from the top-down by an elite corps of social engineers, who replace God or the Apostles. These central planners determine production outputs (i.e., “From each according to his ability”), and then how goods and services are redistributed for the common good (i.e., “to each according to his needs”). The production and distribution of material goods in a Marxian society is thus guided by two principles: first, material goods are to be produced for direct use or use-value (i.e., need) only; second, material goods are to be redistributed for the benefit of the whole community. In the place of money, the State pays workers by giving them vouchers to be redeemed at government-owned stores so that its citizens will not have more material goods than they can use at any given time. After all, the enemy of being is having. Poverty is not simply the unfortunate result of Marxism—it is the goal.

In the Acts of the Apostles in The Holy Bible, Jesus’s disciples form a Christian collectivist society where property is shared between all men. The Apostles’ acts deal with “all that Jesus began both to do and teach, . . . after that he through the Holy Ghost had given commandments unto the apostles whom he had chosen” (Acts I:1-2).” The Apostle Peter then reminded his brothers that they were to fulfill the teachings of Scripture. After the death and resurrection of Jesus, the 12 Apostles formed a community in Jerusalem based on Jesus’s conception of love, or agape, which taught all men to love their neighbor as themselves. To the Apostle’s community were added “about three thousand souls,” who “stedfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship (Acts 2: 41-42).”

But what did the principle of Christian love mean in practice?

This new Christian community, a form of primitive communism, had “all things common,” and they “sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need” (Acts 2:44-45).

This Christian community, formed and guided by agape, was “of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common.” All the new members who joined the Apostle’s community sold their private property and turned all their wealth over to the Apostles (following Christ’s admonition to do so), who then “distributed to each as any had need (Acts 2:42-46, 3:32-35).” There was no private property in this ideal Christian community and all wealth was redistributed and shared by all. The moral intention of this new community was to replace a society in which there were rich and poor with a caring society in which all were the same. This was and is the model for how to live set by Jesus and his closest disciples.

Clearly drawing inspiration from the Apostle’s acts, Karl Marx sought to work out the meaning and challenges associated with the Apostles’ collectivist redistribution. In many ways the most revealing document in Marx’s oeuvre is his Critique of the Gotha Program published in 1875 in which he attempted to explain the moral parameters and mechanisms by which the new socialist society would redistribute the wealth of Peter to pay for Paul.

The challenge that Marx confronted was this: how to reconcile equality and inequality. In other words, Marx believed that men should be treated as equal in value (i.e., as the same), but he also recognized that there was an inequality of talents between men, and he furthermore recognized that some men have a greater capacity to produce more through their labor. Capitalism recognizes and rewards these differences leading to social, political, and economic inequality. Marx knew that the inequalities of abilities and capacities could never be eradicated, but his moral-political goal was equality by which he meant species-sameness. Thus, the question became: can men be made equal or the same? To that end, he shifted the standard of value from production to labor. In other words, workers would not be rewarded based on what they produced but rather on the amount of time that they labored. If two men in the same job both work the same number hours but one produces more than the other, they shall be rewarded equally for the equal time they worked and the equal labor they expended.

Time and labor become Marx’s standard of value. (This only makes sense, though, if both workers expend the same amount of labor in the same amount of time, which of course is never the case.) Marx then introduced a second standard of value by which to determine what is just and unjust in a community of sharing. The second standard is need. Marx recognized that the needs of a married man with eight children were unequal to the needs of a bachelor. If the bachelor’s time and labor working are the same as that of the married father of eight and if they are paid the same, there will be a profound inequality between the two workers, according to Marx. The bachelor will be much wealthier than the married father. If the bachelor is paid $100, then the married father is effectively receiving ten dollars by Marxian logic.

How does Marx solve this dilemma?

Almost as though it were paraphrased from The Bible, Marx described the communism’s moral-political ethic in language almost identical to that found in the Acts of the Apostles. In effect, Marx reinvented or revised the Christian ethic. He describes what a “co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production” that has advanced to the “higher phase of communist society” might look like and how it might work. This new communist society, the one that has restored man to his “species-being,” would take the following principle as its polestar: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” Ability will be reduced to needs, which are, ironically, unequal. This is the moral ideal of communist society. (A near identical use of the phrase was employed by Stalin in the 1936 Soviet Constitution.)

In the same way that Jesus and Christianity had Saul of Tarsus (i.e., St. Paul), so Marx and communism had Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. In his The State and Revolution (1918), Lenin argued (but of course only vaguely) that the transition from bourgeois man to the highest form of communist man requires a kind of spiritual purification. This requires that each man voluntarily work to the best of his ability (regardless of the return), and that each man accept only what he needs (regardless of his productivity). Such a moral-social system only works, of course, if men deny their “selfish” needs or wants and believe that to sacrifice their interests for the sake of others is their highest and most natural duty. Communist equality does not mean equality before the law; indeed, it is opposed to this bourgeois notion of equality. Instead, communist equality means equality of outcomes, and ultimately it means sameness regarding desires, needs, and ambitions. A new soul, indeed, a new man is needed. Human nature must be changed, and man’s original species-being must be restored. This is the communist new man envisioned by Marx and Lenin.

But how does the new communist man come into being?

The answer for Lenin is clear and simple: the dictatorship of the proletariat via the Bolshevik Party and its absolute and total control of the State. The first phase of communism will be achieved by what Lenin calls “accounting and control,” by which he means an accounting of how men work (i.e., their hours and effort) and by controlling how resources are distributed and redistributed.

All citizens are transformed into hired employees of the state, which consists of the armed workers. All citizens become employees and workers of a single countrywide state “syndicate”. All that is required is that they should work equally, do their proper share of work, and get equal pay; the accounting and control necessary for this have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost and reduced to the extraordinarily simple operations–which any literate person can perform–of supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and issuing appropriate receipts.

Lenin’s ideal communist man is a working automaton stripped of his abilities, motivations, and dreams and is driven by what Lenin calls “‘factory’ discipline” to the lowest common denominator. He becomes a field cow who eats, drinks, and produces labor at someone else’s accounting whim and for the collective good.

The problem, of course, is that the voluntarism of ability leads inevitably to the coercion of ability because those with ability will stop producing, and the voluntarism of taking only what one needs leads inevitably to taking beyond what one needs, which in turn requires coercion to investigate one’s legitimate needs. The coercion required to force those of ability to produce more and the coercion required to force those inflating needs to take less can only be monitored and controlled by the State. Still, Marx and Lenin think that all this species-love will lead to the classes society where men and women will enjoy the universal brotherhood of man.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Given the chaos, destruction, murder, torture, and genocide committed by socialism and communism in practice, surely it is necessary that good men and woman stand up and denounce these evil ideologies and denounce them unequivocally. Socialism and communism are obviously evil in theory and practice, and those who support them are morally wicked. These ideologies and their proponents are morally wicked because they want to hurt people (literally)—and they do. Deep in the soul of every socialist is a psychological urge to punish those who have worked hard and succeeded in life. They want to use the coercive force of the State to bend the wills of those who claim they have a right to keep what they have earned. They want to use the coercive force of the State to steal from those who produce and to force them to labor for others—and they do.

In what moral universe is slavery not wrong, even if it’s just a little bit of slavery? And in what moral universe is it ok to guilt people to live their lives for the sake of someone else—someone else they don’t even know—because a third party (usually someone they don’t know) demanded they do so? All decent, thinking, and moral people know this wrong—deeply and profoundly wrong.

It is also imperative that we judge and condemn all other moral-political philosophies that are separated from socialism and communism by degree only or which serve (knowingly or unknowingly) the interests of socialism and communism. Socialism and communism are Christian problems, or at least they should be treated as problems for conservative, libertarian, and classical liberal Christians who oppose all forms of socialism.

Certain mainline Christian churches are deeply compromised by socialism and communism. As we now know, for many socialists and communists Christianity is the gateway drug to support government coerced redistribution. Consider, for instance, the so-called “Seven Sisters,” namely, those mainline Protestant denominations—e.g., the United Methodist Church (UMC), the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the Episcopal Church, the United Church of Christ (UCC), the American Baptist Churches USA (ABCUSA), and the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church)—all of which actively support socialism to one degree or another. And it’s no less true that the Catholic Church has a socialism problem in its ranks. The vast majority of American Christians, across all major churches, believe the government (i.e., you) has a moral responsibility to provide a social safety net for the poor. The primary debate amongst Christian churches is not whether the government should have this role, but how large that role should be. In other words, they’re debating which hairs to split.

It’s no longer good enough for my conservative, libertarian, and classical-liberal Christian friends to tell me that these churches do not represent “true” Christianity, and so therefore we needn’t worry that they are corrupting the Gospel because they’re not Christians. This is an evasion. It doesn’t work because the Christian socialists say they’re the true Christians. Christianity can’t be both pro-socialism and anti-socialism. It’s one or the other.

To my Christian friends, I leave you with these last words: the ball is now in your court.

Have a great week!

**Audio file of “When Marx Met Jesus.” (The nice Englishman who has done my recording thus far was automatically replaced today by my audio creation team with the voice of a nice American woman.)

THE GOOD

READ OF THE WEEK: Why Modern Institutions Expand Forever. The internal logic of big, rich institutions that slowly takes over politics, science, and culture.

ANOTHER IMPORTANT IF DEPRESSING READ: Can the Dark Ages Return? History suggests civilizations fall when complacency, debt, and tribalism replace unity, discipline, and reform—prompting fears the West may be nearing a familiar decline.

EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS ESSAY: The Lost Generation.

• Related: DEI hollowed out a generation — and sapped America’s promise.

LIVE FREE OR DIE: Which American state is the freest? The latest results are in

SCIENCE ROUND-UP:

• This supermassive black hole flung out matter at 134 million mph: ‘On a scale almost too big to imagine.’

• Ridley: Are we finally about to crack fusion energy?

• James Webb Telescope Unveils A Dazzling Map Of The Early Universe.

FREEDOM IS GOOD, BUT WE NEED A LOT MORE OF IT: Freedom! Republicans erased record number of Biden regulations in 2025

MEDICINE/HEALTH ROUND-UP

• Cancer researchers find tattoos protect against melanoma.

• Scientists unveil breakthrough eye drops that restore close-up vision without surgery

• Older adults can bounce back to thriving health, study finds.

• Common vitamin may slash skin cancer risk when taken at specific time

• Brain imaging method reveals hidden vascular changes with aging.

THE ALWAYS GREAT MATT RIDLEY ON THE DISASTER THAT IS GOVERNMENT SCIENCE:

• Matt Ridley: Why Science Lost Its Way Even Before COVID.

• “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer”

THIS IS KIND OF COOL: A pilot turned an old plane into a two-bedroom apartment. Jon Kotwicki jokes that converting an aluminum plane in Alaska is the “worst idea that a person could possibly have.”

ARCHEOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGY ROUND UP:

• Female gladiators shocked the ancient Roman world — but not for the reason you think.

• This 3.4 Million-Year-Old Foot Changes the Story of Human Origins.

• Archaeologists find preserved slave meals in Pompeii — and they beat what free Romans ate

WONDER OF WONDERS. I don’t remember the Founders creating a fourth branch of government:

• Supreme Court Poised to Restore Constitution?

• Supreme Court Seems Likely To Rule That the President Has Control Over, Get This, the Executive Branch.

• Supreme Court seems likely to give Trump more power over agencies.

THREE CHEERS FOR THE BILLIONARIES. I SUPPORT BILLIONARIES SPENDING BILLIONS OF DOLLARS TO LIVE LONGER. One day it will be available for all people. This is not rocket science folks: The billionaire war against death: What happens to the rest of us when the rich stop planning to die?

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THE BAD

IRON LAW OF POLITICS: WHERE THERE IS A WELFARE STATE THERE WILL BE CORRUPTION: Fraud report: Fake people, phony SSNs had 100% success getting Obamacare subsidy

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF GOVERNMENT-ASSISTED SUICIDE? Canada reports record number of euthanasia deaths.

LEVIATHAN: Teaching ferrets to binge drink: Rand Paul’s annual Festivus report finds $1.6 TRILLION in government waste

THE WELFARE STATE, BY DEFINITION, GUARANTEES FRAUD ON A MASSIVE LEVEL:

• GAO Bombshell Reveals Obamacare Fraud on a Massive Scale.

• Damning Watchdog Report Reveals ‘Large-Scale Systemic Failures’ Leading to Obamacare Subsidy Fraud.

• THE SOMALI WELFARE FRAUD SCANDAL IS EVEN WORSE THAN YOU THINK

• Stephen Miller calls billion-dollar Minnesota welfare scam ‘single greatest theft of taxpayer dollars’ with dozens of Somali migrants convicted.

RACING TOWARD NATIONAL BANKRUPTCY: Washington’s Spending Train Is ‘Unstoppable.’

ARE DEMOGRAPHICS DESTINY? Birth rates are plummeting in Europe and in the United States. Do you think population collapse is a threat to civilization?

PULLING BACK THE CURTAIN: Clandestine Campaign To Defund ZeroHedge, The Federalist & Breitbart Traced To Kier Starmer Operation.

CULTURAL SUICIDE OR TREASON?

• Mamdani’s DSA Party pushing China propaganda in new monthly ‘political education’ seminars.

• Ex-New York State official accused of spying for China called Hochul ‘more obedient’ than Cuomo, trial reveals.

THE COVID CZARS DID THIS: ‘May be worse than anything we dare to imagine’: Redeeming the most troubled generation in American history

SUICIDAL EMPATHY IS A REAL THING: Yes, Europe’s civilization is being erased.

SURELY THE TIME HAS COME TO RETHINK THE WELFARE STATE:

• Welfare Fraud In Blue Cities: How Pervasive Is The Kleptocracy?

• Ga. Dem Representative Charged With Pandemic Fraud

• Maine becomes second Democrat-run state hit by accusations of widespread Somali fraud... with woke lawmaker giving vile answer to voter who asked him about it

• Two Georgia Men Sentenced In $17M Pandemic Scam

THOUGHTS, COMMENTS, REACTION? Preschool Propaganda: Study Finds 41% of Netflix Kids Shows Include LGBT Themes

CHINA WATCH:

• Re-orient your map to understand China’s view of the world.

• Chinese billionaires using US surrogates ‘to create mega-families with 100 children’.

• China Is The Most Free Market Economy On The Planet. For a given meaning of “free market” of course.

• Department Of Energy Inadvertently ‘Funding The Military Rise’ Of China: Report

WELFARE IS A RIGHT, OR DIDN’T YA KNOW? SNAP recipient goes viral: “What’s the point of food stamps if it’s just for real food?”

AND YOU WONDER WHY GEN Z AND LATE STAGE MILLENNIAL MEN ARE LEAVING MAINSTREAM POLITICAL PARTIES: Bombshell report: Companies did everything they could to avoid hiring “white millennial men” over the last decade.

UK WATCH:

• Just How Dystopian Can Starmer’s Britain Become?

• Just How Dystopian Can Starmer’s Britain Become? (Part 2)

• Family of Somalian ISIS Leader Living in Taxpayer-Funded Flat in Britain.

• If Britain’s political leadership were trying to destroy the country, what would they have done differently?

THE REAL CRIME IS THE CREATION OF THE WELFARE STATE THAT ALLOWED THIS SCAM TO HAPPEN: Alleged Minnesota fraud ringleader described as ‘a God’ in Somali-linked scam

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THE UGLY

THE TRUTH IS STARTING TO EMERGE, AND IT SHOWS GREAT BRITAIN’S MORAL COLLAPSE: The evil of the grooming gangs is finally being exposed.

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THIS? More Than 200 House Dems Vote Against Bill Criminalizing Transgender Surgery For Minors

CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN THIS TO ME, PLEASE: 18,000 Known Terrorists Released Into US Under Biden: House Report

PLAYING GOD WITH CHILDREN . . . Puberty blocking is an act of neurological vandalism.

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. . . AND THE BEAUTIFUL

MUST THE BEAUTIFUL BRING JOY, OR CAN THE BEAUTIFUL INCLUDE THE PAINFULLY SAD?

Here is the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (1936) conducted by Arturo Toscanini and played by the NBC Symphony orchestra, which I think demonstrates that the latter is possible:

***HAVE A GREAT WEEK!!!

DUMB AND DUMBER (NO. 123)

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K-12 EDITION

OF COURSE THEY ARE: School district that lost sex-ed fight at Supreme Court caught still pushing trans ideologies

GOOD QUESTION: Why are we sending illiterate high school grads to college?

INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW: Why Male Teachers Left Elementary Schools And Won’t Go Back.

I WONDER WHY THE DISTRICT THOUGHT THEY COULD GET AWAY WITH THIS? School district tries to restrict off-campus speech of students, and now court intervenes

A NATION THAT HATES ITSELF CANNOT STAND:

THIS IS THE WAY IT IS: 500 School Districts Publicly Declare Only Woke Teachers Need Apply

HOMESCHOOLING/MICROSCHOOLING EDITION

THE REVOLUTION IS HERE; THE REVOLUTION IS NOW! Homeschooling Hits Record Numbers

ENDORSED: Why Marxism needs to be purged from our classrooms.

HIGHER ED EDITION

THE SCIENCES ARE BECOMING AS CORRUPT AS THE HUMANITIES: The Corruption of the Sciences Is Devastating Our Disciplines.

WHY ARE THEY ALWAYS SO VIOLENT? Fired Illinois State U. TA that flipped TPUSA table arrested for threats against Trump.

THE OLD HARVARD:

THE NEW HARVARD:

AS TAXPAYERS, DO YOU THINK YOUR MONEY SHOULD GO TO UNIVERSITIES WITH NO STRINGS ATTACHED? Professors denounce Trump’s Compact, want taxpayer money with no strings attached.

RETITLED TO ‘GHOST STUDENTS’ STEAL $1B OR MORE IN FINANCIAL AID FROM LEGITIMATE COLLEGE STUDENTS TAXPAYERS: ‘Ghost Students’ Steal $1B Or More In Financial Aid From Legitimate College Students

CESSPOOL OF INTELLECTUAL CORRUPTION: “A civil rights complaint has been filed against Colorado State University alleging that certain ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ social work teaching methods constitute illegal race- and sex-based discrimination.”

GOVERNMENT MONEY = SCAMMING THE GOVERNMENT: ‘Ghost students’: Fake college kids collecting very real cash

MUST READ: Seven faulty theses against viewpoint diversity

YOU MUST REMEMBER THREE THINGS: FIRST, THIS “PROFESSOR” IS TEACHING HUNDREDS OF STUDENTS EVERY YEAR; SECOND, WHERE THERE IS ONE PROFESSOR SAYING THESE THINGS YOU SHOULD ASSUME THERE ARE MANY OTHERS; AND THREE, DON’T FORGET THAT THIS “PROFESSOR” LEARNED THESE IDEAS FROM AN EARLIER GENERATION OF “PROFESSORS”: University professor urges White allies to mirror mass murderer in activism

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DUMB AND DUMBER (NO. 124)

K-12 EDITION

TEACHING CHILDREN HOW TO READ IS NOT THAT HARD IF YOU USE THE CORRECT METHOD, AND PHONICS IS THE METHOD: The reading wars are ending. Phonics won.

WE NEED IT NOW MORE THAN EVER: Classical liberal education: Scarce, embattled, essential

OF COURSE THEY DID/ARE: School district that lost sex-ed fight at Supreme Court caught still pushing trans ideologies

JOIN THE HOMESCHOOL REVOLUTION: Maryland school district asks 11-year-olds to define trans terms like ‘gender expression’ and ‘sex assigned at birth.’

LET THEM HAVE THEIR SCHOOL: Mark Zuckerberg’s illegal school drove his neighbors crazy.

THE EDUCATION DEEP STATE IS FIRST AND FOREMOST A JOBS PROGRAM:

HOMESCHOOLING/MICROSCHOOLING EDITION

TIME FOR TENNESSEE HOMESCHOOLERS TO ORGANIZE: Tennessee Schools Director Who Wants Lawmakers To Crack Down On Homeschooling Oversees District Where Only 1/3 Of Students Are Ready For Life.

HIGHER ED EDITION

I’M SURE THIS IS TRUE, BUT IT DOESN’T MENTION THE COMPLICITY OF AMERICAN SOURCES: University leader drops bombshell claim about who’s really behind campus chaos

WELL OF COURSE: Rutgers professor allegedly shows class slides about ‘girl’s penises,’ ‘gender unicorn’

TEACHING CHILDREN HOW TO READ IS NOT THAT HARD IF YOU USE THE CORRECT METHOD, AND PHONICS IS THE METHOD: The reading wars are ending. Phonics won.

THE STATE OF THE WORLD IN ONE HEADLINE: Nearly 30 Yale undergraduate departments have no Republican faculty, Buckley Institute report finds

CHANGE IS NEEDED, BUT THE QUESTION IS: WHAT AND HOW?

DEFUND: Northwestern provost steps down after anti-Israel messages and controversy at university: The resignation follows months of scrutiny over the university’s handling of anti-Israel activism and federal investigations into discrimination against Jewish students.

100%: Colleges are teaching Gen Z to love socialism.

THIS IS PSYCHOTIC: ‘She needs an intervention’: Watch leftists unleash violence on college campuses because they hate conservative messages

DON’T SOUND SO SURPRISED: Princeton Assigns Antisemite To Teach Class On ‘Gender, Genocide’ In Gaza

GEE, WHY DO YOU THINK THEY DID THIS? Columbia Student Group Promoted China Trip Connected To CCP-Linked Organization

UP, UP, AND AWAY: Pennsylvania Sees The Highest Costs For Colleges, Report Reveals

ANALYSIS TRUE: ‘We as Universities Have Lost Our Way’

***The audio file for this essay (at the bottom) is for paid subscribers only.

“I believe that Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount. . . . I believe that it is possible for Christians to be Marxists as well and to work together with Marxist communists to transform the world.”—Fidel Castro, Fidel and Religion

“Christianity is the grandmother of Bolshevism.”—Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision

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In my last essay in this series, “Communism as Christian Heresy,” I examined the connections and parallels between communism and Christianity. I there described communism as a “Christian heresy” and as “Christianity in a hurry.” Still, we are left with lingering doubts. Indeed, for many, the very thought of a connection between Christianity and communism seems impossible if not absurd. Still, there is a nagging problem: we don’t quite know why and how so many Christians have become socialists or communists over the decades, which is an undeniable fact. It’s also worthing noting that the rise of welfare-state liberalism, socialism, and communism in the West seems inextricably if not eerily connected to those nations most indebted to Christian beliefs. These facts must be understood and accounted for.

My task in this essay is to explain—or at least to begin to explain—the inexplicable. To that end, I shall explore two related questions: Is there something in Christianity that naturally leads Christians to socialism and communism? Conversely, is there something in socialism and Marxian communism that attracts Christian men and women?

Before we tackle these questions, though, let us get a sense of the broader historical and philosophic context in which these conversions have taken place. To repeat: we want to know why and how so many men and women in the West have either transitioned from Christianity to communism, or who have retained their devotion to Christianity but nevertheless support socialist policies.

“GOD IS DEAD” AND THE RISE OF COMMUNISM

The rise of communism overlaps and runs parallel with the decline of Christianity in the West. Christianity began its decline—a decline in the belief that Christianity is true and a slow decline in church membership—in the middle decades of the nineteenth century (though it had been under assault philosophically by Enlightenment thinkers for some 200 years), which is precisely when Marxian communism was born. The theory and practice of communism seemed to fill an intellectual, spiritual, and moral void in the souls of men. It provided them with a new reason to live and hope, and a new form of redemption and salvation in a world in which the Christian faith was losing its hold over the minds and souls of men.

The Christian soul, and with it the soul of the West for over 1,500 years, believed God was the creator of the universe (Genesis 1:1), the creator of light (Genesis 1:3), the creator of “every thing beautiful” (Ecclesiastes 3:11), and the creator of all this is good (Genesis 1:4,10,12,18,21,25). The Prophet Isaiah stated clearly and powerfully the Christian view of God as the father of all creation:

Have ye not known? have ye not heard? hath it not been told you from the beginning? have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in: That bringeth the princes to nothing; he maketh the judges of the earth as vanity. . . . Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one faileth (Isaiah 40: 21-26).

The Christian God was the creator, and He was also a legislator, a judge, and an executor for all things human. He was all knowing and all seeing. The Christian God was a loving and just God, but He was also a jealous, powerful, judgmental, vengeful, and sometimes angry God, who gave men commandments by which to live their lives, and when they didn’t he punished them. The Prophet Nahum tells the people of Judah that their God is a jealous, all-powerful, and vengeful God, who is the sovereign judge over their lives.

God is jealous, and the LORD revengeth; the LORD revengeth, and is furious; the LORD will take vengeance on his adversaries, and he reserveth wrath for his enemies. The LORD is slow to anger, and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked: the LORD hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet. He rebuketh the sea, and maketh it dry, and drieth up all the rivers: Bashan languisheth, and Carmel, and the flower of Lebanon languisheth. The mountains quake at him, and the hills melt, and the earth is burned at his presence, yea, the world, and all that dwell therein (1:2-5).

For those who did not follow His commandments, destruction and damnation hung over their heads as the Sword of Damocles. Within this moral framework, the Christian knew right from wrong and the moral boundaries of his earthly life. The Book of Deuteronomy makes clear how God will treat sinners: “To me belongeth vengeance and recompence; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste” (32:35).

Christianity provided Occidental man with a moral path and compass by which to live his life. It was inconceivable to the Western mind for almost two millennia that it could live without God’s commandments and sanctions, without moral markers to point the way forward.

But what happens when God calls, and no one hears? Conversely, what happens when men call on God, and he does not answer? What happens when men have no foundation on to distinguish between good and evil?

This is precisely what happened to Western man starting in the second half of the nineteenth century. Not since God asked of Eve, “What is this that thou hast done?” (Genesis 3:13), not since God said, “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil” (Genesis 3:22), not since Moses “said unto God, Who am I” (Exodus 3:11), and not since Solomon confronted the apparent meaninglessness of human life in the face of death (Ecclesiastes 3:19-21) had Western man faced such a profound crisis of meaning.

This existential crisis—a nightmare of nightmares—was both summed up and initiated by Friedrich Nietzsche in the shattering 1882 pronouncement of his madman:

‘I seek God! I seek God!’ . . . ‘Whither is God?’ he cried; ‘I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? . . . What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? . . . Whither are we moving? . . . Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine composition? Gods, too, decompose. God is Dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’

Nietzsche was the forensic pathologist of Western culture. The point of his having declared God dead was first to simply announce the fact (to bear witness), then to determine the cause of death, and finally to prognosticate the future consequences of God’s death for Western civilization. To be clear: he was not applauding God’s death. When he says that God is dead what he means is that the belief in the idea of God is declining fast and hard.

Why is that, and who is the “we” in “we have killed him”? For Nietzsche, the philosophic age known as the Enlightenment (with its scientific rationalism and relentless philosophic critique of all irrationalism) murdered the possibility of God. The belief in God was rendered untenable for thinking Europeans.

For Nietzsche, the death of God was a catastrophic moment for Western civilization. For two millennia the Christian God had been the “sun” around which European and American cultures had revolved, but now humanity was unchained from the gravitational force of its life-giving source. In particular, the belief in the Christian God provided men with purpose and meaning in their lives. And without this belief, men and women were left to drift in an infinite, cold, dark, and meaningless void. With this one earth-shattering pronouncement, the entire moral framework of Western civilization imploded.

The death of God ushered in the birth of nihilism, which represents the death of the moral world order. In the Preface to the Will to Power (1887-1888), Nietzsche claims that his book presents the “history of the next two centuries,” which is “the advent of nihilism.” Nietzsche’s nihilism says that there is no truth, no value, no beauty, no goodness, and, ultimately, no meaning to life. Pure or radical nihilism is, Nietzsche wrote, “the conviction of an absolute untenability of existence when it comes to the highest values.” The highest or most perfect form of nihilism requires not just the transvaluation of all value but the destruction of all values. The Christian God gave man moral boundaries and a reason and purpose to live, but without God everything—everything that had once been considered morally taboo—becomes permissible and sometimes even celebrated.

The death (or murder) of God shatters any connection between men and their Maker, and with that rupture, men must return to that time and place before God gave light, which of course means there was no “In the beginning.” Man returns to the “infinite nothing,” to that cold place and time where all is darkness and chaos. This means that man’s situation is worse—much worse—than after the time when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden. And there is no return to God through Christ, and there is no possibility of man’s rediscovering the Tree of Life as prophesied in the Book of Revelation (22:2). Jesus’s “good tidings” have turned to dust. There is no possibility of a Kingdom of God and, without that promise, man has no incentive to be good.

Worse: the death of God puts man beyond all good and evil. Thus, the belief in a transcendent moral truth collapsed, and the dizzying vertigo of nihilism left Western man disoriented and on his hands and knees.

Starting in the nineteenth century, European Christians no longer faced the struggle between good and evil because there was neither. As Nietzsche put it in Twilight of the Idols (1889):

They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. . . . When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. . . . Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands. . . . Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God is the truth—it stands and falls with faith in God.

And with the death of God came the death of Christian morality. In the wake of Nietzsche’s declaration, nothing could or would be the same again. As Nietzsche put it in The Gay Science (1882), “The greatest recent event—that ‘God is dead,’ that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable—is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe.” Nietzsche’s dramatic and dire announcement left European man unmoored in stormy seas without a moral rudder to guide him. God, Christ, the Gospels, and the Church had provided men with moral boundaries, guidance, and inspiration for almost eighteen-hundred years.

But what happens to men whose lives are now unprotected and left to fortune? What happens when all promise, all future hope, and all expectation come to an end with God’s death?

The receding tide of Christianity and its soul-wrenching effects on European man were expressed brilliantly by Matthew Arnold in his poem, “Dover Beach” (1867). Without the light of Christ’s gospel and “good tidings,” what was left for men to guide and uplift their spirits?

But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world. Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The existential crisis first announced by Nietzsche’s prophecy left men without direction, purpose, and meaning in their lives. The nineteenth century launched for Western man a crisis of meaning. All was now darkness.

Almost 80 years later, as the crisis deepened, W. H. Auden captured the psychological and moral malaise that slowly engulfed men and women starting sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century, and which crashed like a cultural Tsunami in the early twentieth century. In his poem, “The Age of Anxiety,” Auden expressed the existential burdens and the sense of doom experienced by men without the guiding hand of their Christian God:

Storm invades . . .

To the waiting sea, where the weary find rest,
Where the lost are found, where the lonely are loved,
Where the heart is healed in the haven of peace.
Here we halt, here we hope to dwell,
In the quiet kingdom of the quelled passions,
In the gentle garden of generous deeds.
But the path is perilous, the passage unsure,
And the map is missing for the maze we must tread.
Who will guide us, who will guard our going,
Through the dark defiles, the dangerous turns?
Only the One, the Original,
The Maker of mountains, the Mover of stars,
The Shaper of shadows, the Shifter of sands,
He who holds in His hand the heart of the world,
He who knows the need of the nameless and lost,
He who sees the sparrow and spares it its fall,
He who builds the bridge and binds the broken,
He who calms the chaos and calls us His own,
Our colossal father.

But “Our colossal father” is dead announced Nietzsche’s madman. The message was clear: he’s not coming home, and he can’t save us. Man is alone, and his burden is one of fear and trembling.

After the metaphorical death of God, Western man had two paths forward. One path led toward Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and the other path led toward Marx’s communist man (who is Nietzsche’s “Last Man”). The Nietzschean path leads to a secular resurrection of a new God in the form of Zarathustra and a new Jesus in the form of the Übermensch, and the Marxian path leads to the secular resurrection of a new God in the form of History and the dialectic and a new Jesus in the form of Marx himself. (I may one day examine the Nietzschean path, but our concern today is with the Marxian path.)

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THUS SPOKE MARX

With the death of God, socialism in its many nineteenth-century forms emerged as the most potent and promising of these new temporal faiths. Marxian socialism offered a comprehensive secular replacement for the shattered Christian cosmology and eschatology.

As we saw in “Communism as Christian Heresy,” Marx replaced the transcendent Christian God with “History,” which he presented as a purposeful, directional, and dialectical force moving inexorably toward a final, redemptive goal. This new religion had its own savior (Marx), its own holy scriptures (the collected works of Marx), its own disciples and prophets (Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, etc.), its own chosen people (the Proletariat), its own church (the Bolshevik Party or Comintern), its own Book of Revelation with its promise of a final judgment (the Manifesto of the Communist Party), and its own promise of a Kingdom of Heaven in the form of a Kingdom of Freedom where all suffering is forever abolished (see The German Ideology). Marxism provided the masses (but in truth only the priestly class of so-called “intellectuals”) who were adrift in a meaningless universe, with an all-encompassing moral narrative that explained everything—past, present, and future. The socialist vision gave meaning and hope to the poor and suffering.

Karl Marx’s self-presentation was that of a secular Savior, who gave men, particularly those who were poor and destitute, a cause—a final cause full of cosmic significance. Marx’s stirring words gave men a reason to live, to hope, and to fight: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre. . . . The communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. . . . . Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!”

Suddenly, men—particularly the so-called intellectuals—had a new reason to live (and die if necessary) and a new faith to which they could attach their deepest longings and allegiances. The words of Marx and Engels remind one of Paul’s letters to the Ephesians in which he implored them to “Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand (Ephesians 6:11-13).” Communism and Christianity have both been massive forces in the world precisely because they appeal to man’s sense of righteousness and cosmic justice.

But what exactly is this sense of righteousness and cosmic justice? What is its deepest source? Where does it come from? To what passion or longing in the human soul do socialism and communism appeal?

Despite the massive differences between communism and Christianity, they do share and are motivated by—even if only subconsciously—three fundamental passions: 1) envy, which translates into contempt for the rich and all differentiating wealth; 2) guilt, which translates into empathy for the poor and downtrodden; and 3) autophobia, which translates into love for the universal brotherhood of mankind. Communism and Christianity are therefore driven by a combined and powerful emotional impulse to punish the wealthy, to help the needy, and to unite with others as their primary moral motives. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, some Christians transferred their passions and their faith to a new cause to achieve the moral ends of their old faith.

Both the communist and the Christian begin with a similar moral passion for a certain kind of justice that almost always sides with the poor and weak against the wealthy and powerful in the name of humanity. This tripartite gospel of deliverance appeals to the poor and dispossessed, and it appeals most often to the children of privilege who seek absolution from guilt and participation in a righteous cause above and beyond themselves. Communism and Christianity promise different kinds of salvation, but they are both forms of redemption within shouting distance of each other.

The socialist ethic is a direct continuation of Jesus’s championing of the “poor,” the “exploited,” the “oppressed,” and the “downtrodden,” whose condition becomes the standard of moral and political righteousness. It furthermore treats the successful, the wealthy, and the powerful—as did both the Bible’s Old and New Testaments—as an inherently evil and exploitative class. The socialist ethic, borrowing from the Christian ethic condemns selfishness or self-interest as a cardinal vice and selflessness or self-sacrifice as a cardinal virtue.

THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY

For most nineteenth-, twentieth-, and now twenty-first century socialists and communists, the deepest source of their passion for “social” justice and redemption originated in their childhood experiences with Christian ethics. So it was for Fidel Castro, for instance, who once said that during those years when he was leaving formal Christianity and becoming a communist, he retained the ethics of Jesus that he learned as a boy, and therefore he always sided with the poor against the wealthy. Castro’s transition from the ethics of Jesus to the ethics of Marx was relatively easy, simple, and seamless. The morality of his revolutionary socialist outlook was formed originally as a boy from his deeply Christian mother, grandmother, and aunts, and then from his schoolteachers, all of whom grounded young Fidel in the moral teachings of Jesus.

From Jesus, Comandante Castro claimed to have been formed by three core Christian teachings: 1) to hate the rich and powerful for their alleged injustices, humiliations, and abuses against the poor and weak; 2) to love the poor and weak for their poverty, weakness, and helplessness; and 3) to admire and reward the selfless martyrdom of those who sacrifice their selfish interests for the sake of others.

To achieve these Christian ends, Castro, now the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary, developed and then implemented a strategy for deep social change that involved educating Christians to become communists, which he did by teaching the poor, weak, and trembling that the ethics of Marx were those of Jesus. He spoke the language of Jesus to the downtrodden to gently and subtly move them to support the communist movement and join the political struggle.

Castro, more than most communist leaders, spent a great deal of time meeting and working with Catholic Bishops in Cuba, the United States, and in the rest of Latin America to relieve the suffering of the poor and downtrodden. The Cuban Marxist-Leninist told the US Bishops, for instance, that the ethics of Jesus he was taught as a boy were at the heart of his understanding of communism and that the only meaningful differences between Christianity and communism were those of means and methods. Castro believed, he said, that Marxist-Leninists had developed the idea of Christian love “to its highest point and that a communist society will develop it still more,” and that “it is possible for Christians to be Marxists as well and to work together with Marxist communists to transform the world.”

Buried deep in the secular sub-conscious of many Western socialists and communists is a pang of their inherited Judeo-Christian conscience—that is, their Christian love and Jewish guilt. The Jewish concept “Tikkun Olam,” for instance, which means “repairing the world,” and Christ’s admonition to his followers at Matthew 25:31-46, emphasize the individual’s ethical responsibility for “social” justice, which can lead to guilt when individuals feel they have not done enough to improve the world or live up to their Jewish or Christian moral standards.

Likewise, the Christian who is tempted by or ultimately converts to communism is no doubt succored by Mary’s song of praise to her newborn son: “He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.” (Luke 1:52-53). At the end of volume one of Capital, Marx gives the Christian convert to communism a teaching to mirror Mary’s Magnificat, where “History” replaces the “He” as the agent of justice and social change. As with Mary, Marx is describing the final, apocalyptic climax of the capitalist system, a moment of revolutionary reversal that directly mirrors the language of the Magnificat:

Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

The means employed by communism and Christianity are different, but their ends are similar. Communism is the only systematic doctrine in the modern world that has been able to translate the moral impulse of Christianity into a secular faith of hope and redemption. In the words of Catholic theologian, José Porfirio Miranda (1924-2001), “for a Christian to claim to be an anti-communist . . . constitutes the greatest scandal of our century.” Why a scandal? Because, in Miranda’s words, “it is Christianity that started communism.” The fact of the matter is that from the first century A.D. to the twenty-first, many Christians have been devout (mostly non-Marxian) socialists of one kind or another. Indeed, in their words, they only want to see the gospel become reality. Communism was founded, they claim, with and by Christianity. Christian communists typically reject the materialism and atheism of Marxian communism, but they believe that the moral ideal of communism is called for in The Bible as the proper and necessary way in which to organize one’s communal life. In sum, according to Miranda, “the Bible teaches communism” and “communism is obligatory for Christians.”

I leave you, my friends, with one question: how shall the non-communist, non-socialist, non-Progressive, non-liberal, non-woke Christian respond to Miranda’s claims?

Everything depends upon your answer!

Have a great week!

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There will be no Redneck Intellectual next week and possibly not for a couple of weeks. I have three trips planned in the next two weeks and several major work commitments that must take priority. I’m hoping to be back in two or three weeks with a new essay for my ongoing series on the philosophic battle between between the proponents of self-interest and self-sacrifice. The tentative title for the next essay will be something like “The Death of God and the Birth of Socialism.”

THE GOOD

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Coffee’s delicious journey from tiny bean to tasty brew.

WE NEED A LOT MORE OF THIS KIND OF THNG: American scientists discover game-changing weapon against China’s economic warfare

I’M IMPRESSED AND IT TAKES A LOT TO IMPRESS ME: Croatian Freediver Shatters Record For Longest-Held Breath. “On June 14 of this year, Vitomir Maričić took one last gulp of pure oxygen and lay down in a pool. There he remained, cool as a sea cucumber, for 29 minutes and 3 seconds.”

SOCIETY, HEAL THYSELF: Divorce Rate Down 36% Since 1980 Peak

MEDICINE/HEALTH ROUND-UP

• Exercise Can Help Fight Breast Cancer, Experiments Show.

• New cancer vaccine shows ‘exciting’ results as patients remain disease-free

• Could Glucose Be the Key to Next-Generation Cancer Treatments?

• Can vitamin D supplements really slow aging, as a recent study suggests?

• Muscle Cramps Have a Surprise Cause We Never Realized, Study Suggests.

CONGRATULATIONS: 3 scientists win Nobel in chemistry for work in molecular architecture.

TO NOT WIN WOULD BE A DISASTER: Finding the energy to win the global AI race

WOW: ‘Liquid Uranium Rocket Cuts Mars Trip to 6 Months’: Ohio State Scientists Achieve 1,800-Second Nuclear Engine Performance.

DO YOU FOLLOW SCIENCE OR IDEOLOGY? Blockbuster sea level study may turn climate change orthodoxy on its head.

NEVER FOR A SECOND DID I THINK THAT PEOPLE REACH THEIR PEAK IN THEIR LATE TWENTIES AND EARLY THIRTIES: Study Reveals The Surprising Age at Which Your Brain Reaches Its Peak.

ARCHEOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGY ROUND-UP

• Archaeologists find ‘vile’ dungeon site hiding beneath city’s market square

• Humans evolved fastest among the apes, 3D skull study shows.

• After 2,100 Years, Archaeologists Found the Missing Head of an Ancient Greek Statue.

• A 10-Year-Old Girl Went for a Walk on the Beach—and Stumbled Upon 5 Dinosaur Footprints.

THE GREAT AWAKENING: Record 62% Say Federal Government Is Too Powerful: Gallup

GET MARRIED AND HAVE BABIES. Pretty simple formula unless the government screws it up, and the government has screwed up retirement in a big way, which in turn disincentivizes young people from starting families: Want more babies? Then reform the pensions system.

THE DISORDER THAT HAS BEEN IN THE UNIVERSE IS RIGHTING ITSELF: This might be a bit premature but, “The Great Reclamation” is underway.

WHO IS JOHN GALT? (As true today as when it was written.) “Get the hell out of my way!“

CHANGE: ‘The world is waking up’: Surveys show trans identification in ‘free-fall’ among young people

SCIENCE ROUND-UP

• Scientists prepare for the next Carrington Event: ‘Should such an event occur, there are no good solutions.’

• What’s Glowing at the Center of Our Galaxy? New Study Points to Dark Matter.

• The Universe ‘Will End in a Big Crunch,’ Physicists Warns.

• Physicists Have Mathematically Proven the Universe Is Not a Simulation.

LONG OVERDUE: First liquid-fueled reactor in America: US firm readies to deploy Gen IV reactor by 2026.

THE ASTRONOMERS NEED BETTER SUNGLASSES: Astronomers discover 2nd fastest asteroid in the solar system hiding in the sun’s glare. On the other hand: Solar-Powered Eye Implant Restores Reading Vision.

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THE BAD

IMPORTANT, MUST READ FROM HELEN ANDREWS: The Great Feminization.

WHEN EVERYONE IS A FASCIST, NO ONE IS A FASCIST:

• Now Even Stay-At-Home Moms are Fascist.

• The Left Won’t Give Up “Fascism” Charge, Expands Definition.

WOW! The state of American culture is not good. I would very much like to see the manifesto: Man With 200 Explosives And Leftist Manifesto Arrested Outside Supreme Court Event At Church: Police

ARE YA HAVIN’ A LAUGH YET? Antifa Thinks They Are The True Americans.

PERFORMATIVE COSPLAYTRIOT: SHOULD BE GIVEN $$$$ TO “STUDY” REPARATIONS:

THIS WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED IF DONALD TRUMP HAD NOT TALKED ABOUT CANADA AS THE 51^ST STATE: Totalitarian Canada’s Bill to cut off the internet to dissenters.

AT THIS POINT, WHY THE HELL NOT? Ohio legislature introduces law to ban people from marrying AI.

CHINA WATCH:

• Beijing’s Military Diplomacy Is Making Major Gains.

• Foreign Investors Trapped in China’s Real Estate Meltdown as $140 Billion Bet Unravels Further.

• China Is Making a Big Move In Our Own Backyard — But No One Is Talking About It。

• Top analyst says China is playing a ‘key role’ in the price of gold going through the roof, and he’s got the data to prove it.

• Trump was right about China’s threat, now a new danger lurks in American hospitals

UK WATCH:

• Suicides in Starmer’s sea of despair.

• We haven’t room for a new Sheffield every year.

• Think Before You Post | How the UK fell to a sinister new form of censorship | FULL DOCUMENTARY VIDEO.

• Https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0smxO4WiOA

ON ROOTEDNESS: Call us England or Britain – but never UK!

CANADA WATCH:

• Is Canada Becoming the Center of Organ Harvesting Tourism?

• Toronto School In Hot Water For Playing Arabic Version Of ‘O Canada’

• Oh Canada! Your Government Took Your Guns, Now Your Homes. Get It, Yet?

• Canada spearheads the global death cult.

• When a Tribe Whose Great Great Great Grandparents Once Fished There Now Owns Your Property.

END THE GRIFT: The Paris climate agreement has utterly failed – why keep up the pretense?

IT’S COME TO THIS! Should We Vacation at Port-au-Prince or Chicago?

FIRST THE SEX ABUSE SETTLEMENTS, THEN THE FIRES, AND NOW MORE MASSIVE SEX ABUSE SETTLEMENTS. How does Los Angeles survive this financially? LA County On The Hook For Another $828M In New Sex-Abuse Settlement

WHO’S GOING TO TELL HER? har·em| ˈherəm | noun (in former times) the separate part of a Muslim household reserved for wives, concubines, and female servants. Chelsea Clinton Lectures Trump on the ‘People’s House’ and Trips Over Her Own Parents Instead.

THEY TOLD US WE SHOULD “LEARN TO CODE” WHEN THEY SHOULD HAVE TOLD US TO BECOME ELECTRICIANS AND PLUMBERS. I also predict a rise in pest control jobs: AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers, Stanford study reveals.

WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON THIS? When the “Right To Die” becomes the “Duty To Die”.

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DUMB AND DUMBER (NO. 121)

K-12 EDITION

SERIOUSLY, WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? Ill. Teacher Faces Exploitation Charges; 11% Of Students Groomed

WHY, OVER THE COURSE OF THE LAST 25+ YEARS, HAS THERE BEEN AN EPIDEMIC OF YOUNG, FEMALE TEACHERS ARRESTED FOR HAVING SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH STUDENTS? Former Teacher, Cheer Coach Indicted For Alleged Sexual Relat…

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***This is a special edition from The Redneck Intellectual. I wasn’t able to write an essay on the meaning of the Zohran Mamdani election as mayor of NYC (which I fear is a watershed moment), but I have collected and sorted a number of articles for your consideration.

WHERE WE ARE

NYC ON SUICIDE WATCH: Washington Post editorial says Mamdani ‘drops the mask’ after election win, offers ‘seething’ victory speech.

IT’S REAL NOW: WATCH: The enemy has captured ground: Mamdani’s Marxist-Islamist takeover of NYC

MANY OF US HAVE KNOWN THIS FOR DECADES! IT’S OFFICIAL: The Democratic Party Is Now Straight Up Socialist. And here are a couple of lib-Dems admitting this in 2009: A Big Lie: Newsweek Claims On Cover ‘We Are All Socialists Now’.

NIHILISM + SOCIALISM = PORTLAND: The far-Left is devastating Portland. Its childless hipster residents couldn’t care less.

BY ALL MEANS NECESSARY, OR, THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS: The left’s deep-rooted violence is what insurrection really looks like.

WHEN YOU EVADE REALITY, YOU WILL, ULTIMATELY, BE WILLING TO DO JUST ABOUT ANYTHING TO ACHIEVE YOUR IMPULSES: THE PROGRESSIVE FLIGHT FROM REALITY

LET ME COUNT THE WAYS: How Utterly Lost Is The Left?

A GOOD ARTICLE ON OUR PRESENT DISCONTENTS: Eric S. Raymond on “Gramscian Damage.”

OUTSTANDING ESSAY ON THE STATE OF AMERICA AND OUR PRESENT DISCONTENTS: The Progressive Left’s Descent Into Barbarism: Can we re-civilize our society?

COMING TO A TOWN NEAR YOU: The Politics of Anarchy: Socialists regard disorder as a means to an end: government control.

I DUNNO KNOW. Let’s ask Bill Kristol: Has America Found Its Mussolini in Mamdani?

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HOW WE GOT HERE

THE CLOWARD-PIVEN STRATEGY (GOOGLE IT) IS WORKING, WHICH MEANS YOU’RE LOSING:

• What the Welfare State Hath Wrought.

• Delectable crackers’: Black woman threatens to hunt down, ROAST and EAT white people if government assistance is taken away

MARXISTS GONNA DO WHAT MARXISTS GONNA DO: Socialist’s Unquenchable Thirst for Power.

THE LONG MARCH THROUGH THE INSTITUTIONS: The most terrifying thing the far left is doing to cripple our society that you don’t know about yet.

FACT: Socialism: A Cataclysmic Plague on Civilization.

MUST READ: THE ZINN PROTOCOLS:

SOCIALISM IS THE PHILOSOPHY OF ENVY AND RESENTMENT PUT IN PRACTICE: Upon which socialism rests.

THE WICKEDNESS OF THE WICKED:

• The Banality of Leninism.

• THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND

THIS IS SO MUCH WORSE THAN ANY OF YOU REALIZE: Zohran Mamdani’s Ivy League Intifada

THEY’RE VERY GOOD AT THIS KIND OF THING: How the Left Changed NYC Voting Rules To Help Mamdani

IT’S THE COLLEGE’S, STUPID: More college students favor socialism than capitalism, new poll finds.

AMERICA PROLETARIANIZED YOUNG PEOPLE VIA THE EDUCATION SYSTEM: Billionaire Peter Thiel warns if you ‘proletarianize the young people,’ don’t be surprised they end up communist

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WHERE WE’RE HEADED

AND SO IT BEGINS: Communist Party USA Member, Cornell Student Elected Councilwoman In Upstate NY

LIVE COVERAGE FROM THE MAMDANI VICTORY PARTY:

NEXT UP: THE BILLIONAIRES WILL NOT BE PERMITTED TO LEAVE THE CITY: Zohran Mamdani drops the mask: The mayor-elect divides New Yorkers into two groups: the oppressed and their oppressors.

THIS IS NUTS: Mamdani taps ‘architect’ of $1.1B plan to replace cops with social workers

COLLECTIVE IDEOLOGICAL PSYCHOSIS IS A THING, A REAL THING, AN ALL-TOO-REAL THING THAT MUST BE TREATED: AMERICA’S PROGRESSIVE DESCENT INTO PSYCHOSIS

WAS THIS NOT OBVIOUS FROM DAY ONE? Now It Can Be Told: Mamdani’s Plans Are Going to Be Wildly Expensive.

AND SO IT BEGINS: NYPD already losing officers with morale plunging as anti-cop Zohran Mamdani prepares to take reins.

JUST SO WE’RE CLEAR: MAMDANI WAS THE ANTIFA CANDIDATE. Antifa is not an anarchist organization. It sows anarchy simply as the means to achieving the end of socialism. Antifa is what might be called the SA wing of the Democratic Socialists of America. (SA stands for Sturmabteilung, which translates to “Storm Detachment” or “Assault Division.” The SA, or brownshirts, was a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party.): HOW THE ANTIFA MIND WORKS

HO, AND BY THE WAY, . . . Who Funds Antifa? . . . and . . . Shadowy ‘Collective’ Helps Antifa Avoid Police Detection

ANTIFA IS THE TERRORIST WING OF THE SOCIALIST-COMMUNIST MOVEMENT: Origins Of Antifa Traced To Stalinist Russia Communist Group That Aided Hitler

THIS IS NOT THE 1960S BY WHICH I MEAN THAT YOUR CRAZY LEFTISM IS NO LONGER COOL: Far-Left Group Threatens To ‘Escalate’ Hostilities Unless Supreme Court Is Abolished

THE MOMENT YOU REALIZE FASCISM IS NOT WHAT YOU’VE BEEN TOLD IT IS: Google Tells us that the Creator of Fascism was Anti-Socialist: But was He? Fascism, Nazism and Socialism are all terms which are misunderstood and misused today. Even Google gets it wrong, such as when it says historically false things regarding key historical figures.

• Related: How to Become a Good Communist.

WELL, HE DID PROMISE FREE BUS RIDES:

• Escape from New York: Bankers flee Mamdani for Texas.

• New York elites flock to Florida after Mamdani victory

SOCIALISM + ISLAMISM = GET THE HELL OUT: What The Democratic Socialists Are Demanding From Mamdani Is Truly Terrifying.

WHAT THE PROFESSORS HATH WROUGHT: ‘We’re Done Hiding’: Mamdani’s Win Supercharges Islamists’, Marxists’ Confidence.

REALITY WILL NO DOUBT TEMPER MAMDANI AND HIS CRAZIES, BUT THAT’S HARDLY CONSOLATION. There are thousands more like him being trained at Columbia and NYU: The Clock Now Ticks on Zohran Mamdani

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WHAT WE MUST DO

THOUGHTS, COMMENTS, REACTION? It’s Time To Crush The Leftist Insurrection Once And For All: Democrats are daring the administration to invoke the constitutional response to their lawlessness.

SHOWTIME: Patel Close To Cracking Antifa Funding Sources.

IS THIS TRUE? WHAT DO YOU THINK? The Left Has Never Been Held Accountable For Political Violence — And That Must Change.

THE WAY FORWARD:

A GOOD ANALYSIS OF THE PROBLEM AND A GOOD RESPONSE TO THE PROBLEM:

Have a great week!

***This essay is the tenth in a series tracing historically the philosophic battle of ideas between the proponents and critics of what I consider to be the two core moral concepts in Western ethical discourse: selfishness and selflessness or self-interest and self-sacrifice. The first half of this two-part essay will examine the relationship between communism and Christianity, and the second will examine the relationship between Karl Marx’s moral philosophy and that of Jesus Christ.

The audio file is here for both paid and unpaid subscribers.

“And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.”—Genesis 11:4

“Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.”—Luke 11:2-4

“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”—II Corinthians 5:17

The history of early Christianity has many characteristic points of contact with the present labor movement. . . . Both Christianity and proletarian socialism preach the coming deliverance from slavery and property . . .”—Friedrich Engels, On the History of Early Christianity

One of the great intellectual problems that has preoccupied me for the past decade boils down to a single question: why have so many smart people been attracted to socialism and communism over the course of the last 175 years, and, more particularly, why do they continue to support communism despite the well-documented genocidal horrors committed by Marxism in practice? In other words, why does the socialist nightmare qua dream never seem to die? Why does communism persist?

I have, more particularly, wondered about the relationship between communism and Christianity. On the surface, these two thought systems seem to have very little in common; indeed, the differences are countless and massive, which raises yet another question: why have so many Christians become communists? This is a critically important question that must be explored, understood, and explained. But what if the answer explains why communism never seems to die?

I am not the first person to address the issues raised by these questions, nor shall I be the last. To write on the relationship between communism and Christianity is a thankless task. The topic invites debate and controversy. This essay will no doubt provoke many people, and that’s okay. It will upset both my Marxist enemies and my Christian friends, who will claim that communism and Christianity have nothing to do with each other. In a sense they are right: communism and Christianity are mortal enemies. Moreover, competing schools of Marxist thought (e.g., Leninist vs. Trotskyist) will no doubt complain about my presentation of communism, and different Christian denominations (e.g., Catholic vs. Protestant vs. Orthodox) will no doubt complain about my understanding of Christianity.

My goal is not, however, to offend. My goal is to explore, understand, and explain.

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On the Relationship Between Communism and Christianity

That Christianity and communism are antipodes and mortal enemies is virtually a truism. The differences between them are deep, profound, and surely irreconcilable. Each regards itself as the final truth and the other as dangerously false. For 150 years, they have competed as rival faiths for the spiritual allegiance of humankind. To put a sharp edge on the point, let us not forget that Karl Marx described religion in his 1844 “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” as “the opium of the people,” nor should we forget that Pope Pius XI said of communism in his 1937 encyclical Divini Redemptoris that it “is intrinsically wrong, and no one who would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it in any undertaking whatsoever.” The hostility of communists toward Christianity is as real as that of Christians toward communism. Each delight in reminding the other of the piles of corpses left in its wake.

Just as we might say “A spectre is haunting Christianity—the spectre of communism,” so we might also say “A spectre is haunting communism—the spectre of Christianity”!

Let’s begin by considering a few obvious theoretical differences between communism and Christianity. At the heart of Christianity is a belief in the eternal and universal existence of an omnipotent and infallible God (i.e., the Creator of the universe and man), and at the heart of Marxian communism is a militant atheism, the conviction that God and all other supernatural beings do not exist. Christianity is also concerned with a kingdom beyond the material realm—the kingdom of heaven—that is not of this world. The Marxist believes that there is nothing but this world and matter in motion. The essential mark of Christianity is its other-worldliness; that of communism, its this-worldliness.

Christians believe, moreover, that Jesus Christ was a real, living, historical man, but who was also the immortal son of God. All of this is poppycock for the Marxian communist. The message of the Apostle’s Creed is anathema to Marx and communism. What possible relationship could the Manifesto of the Communist Party have with Christ’s teaching in the New Testament? It is also true that Christ, unlike Marx, was not concerned with politics or political change, let alone revolution. Contrast, for instance, Christ’s admonition in Matthew 22:21 (KJV) to “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” and Paul’s charge to the Romans to “Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor” (KJV Romans 13:7) with Marx’s claim in his “Theses on Feuerbach” that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” Jesus was concerned with changing men’s souls in preparation for the afterlife. Communists only think of politics and the here-and-now, and they do not think of the human soul as immortal.

In practice, communism and Christianity fought a pitched battle against one another throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century and most definitely through almost the entirety of the twentieth century. Many Christians have been rounded up in communist countries and tortured and executed and vice versa. Communists want all men to be communists, and Christians want all men to be Christians. To quote from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Ballad of East and West” (1889), “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” Hence, communism is committed to destroying Christianity and Christians pray for a world without atheistic communism.

And yet, despite it all these profound differences, it’s hard to ignore the fact that communism and Christianity share certain characteristics that seem to overlap in both theory and practice. Indeed, for many, communism is, despite its atheism and materialism, a kind of secular religion—a faith of universal hope, redemption, and salvation, which provides a clue as to why so many Christians have become communists. It is simply a well-established fact that many communists were once Christians and even some Christians were once communists. The famous case of Whittaker Chambers is a telling example. Chambers was raised in a Christian household, converted to communism at age 25, and then converted back to Christianity some 20 years later. With the notable exception of China and southeast Asia, socialism has grown organically, root and branch, in Christian countries in Europe and the Americas. These are hard truths, particularly for conservative Christians who hate communism and love capitalism.

Communism, for all its anti-Christianism, bears certain resemblances to Christianity on several fronts. There is no identity between the two, but there is affinity. The Christian Church bases its authority on a commission from God, and the Communist Party bases its authority on a commission from History, Fate, or the Dialectic. Marx, like Jesus, created a faith and promised men a new future and destiny. The great twentieth-century novelist, Arthur Koestler (author of Darkness at Noon) wrote in his autobiography about his experiences as a Marxist and member of the Communist Party, which highlights this point. In The Invisible Writing (1954), Koestler quotes these revealing words of a young Soviet official.

We are believers. Not as you are. We do not believe either in God or in men. We manufacture gods and we transform men. We believe in Order. We will create a universe in our image, without weaknesses, a universe in which man, rid of the old rags of Christianity, will attain his cosmic grandeur, in the supreme culmination of the species. We are not fighting for a régime, or for power, or for riches. We are instruments of Fate.

Marxism functions as a replacement for—or rival to—Christianity, offering a total explanation of reality and man’s place in it, along with a sense of cosmic purpose. Marx’s dialectical materialism serves as a substitute for the biblical account in Genesis about the origin of the universe and subsequent human history. It mirrors the endless hope of Christians that the kingdom of God will return to its earthly, pre-Edenic paradise—a new Jerusalem.

One naturally wonders if those who left Christianity to become communists were simply rejecting Christianity outright, or whether they were simply transferring their moral allegiance to a new faith in the hope that their heavenly aspirations could be realized on earth in the here and now. The Christian convert to communism swaps the resurrection for insurrection. To these former Christians, communism represented a vision of the Kingdom of God on earth. Communism, like Christianity, offers all men deliverance from present injustice and suffering, promising to all believers a new world defined by equality, justice, and the brotherhood of all men. The gospels of Jesus and Marx speak directly to the poor, the meek, the suffering, and the hungry. They also speak indirectly to the rich or the bourgeoisie, who are taught to repent and feel guilt for their wealth.

All of this would suggest that there was something within Christ’s moral teachings and the accompanying Christian conscience that transferred rather easily and naturally to the communist conscience and moral teaching. Most Western converts to communism (and virtually all communists born outside of established communist nations were and are converts) would seem to have been motivated by the moral pangs or prickings (i.e., guilt) of their Christian conscience. There is something about socialism and communism that appeals to the Christian conscience.

What is it?

Despite his having referred to religion “is the opium of the people,” Marx himself (born a Jew and raised a Christian) did demonstrate a certain degree of sympathy for the teachings of Christianity. In the sentences immediately preceding this famous utterance in his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Marx expresses a much more subtle and even appreciative understanding of the role played by Christianity in human affairs. Christianity arose, he suggested, out of suffering. It is “an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.” Religion, he continued, “is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” Marx believed that Christianity played an important role in relieving human suffering when it was first founded.

The problem with Christianity from Marx’s perspective is that it had adapted itself over the centuries to the extant powers and economic structures and had therefore become an ally of the bourgeois and capitalist oppressor class. Christianity, according to Marx, Engels, Lenin and their twenty-first century descendants, came to be used by the ruling classes as a tool of domination, exploitation, and subjugation. For Marx, the original moral impulse of Christianity was salutary.

To call communism a post-Christian religion is to recognize it as a complete faith, with its own unique liturgy, sacraments, conversion rites, dogmas, principles, hierarchic structures, festivals, and forms of sacrifice and salvation that mirror those of Christianity and lead to the same earthly end: the universal brotherhood of man. Communism is a new kind of religious faith because it is a dream and hope of a better future grounded in the certainty of its claims. It promotes a kind of personal salvation through union with forces and powers greater than the isolated and lonely individual. In the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews, which sums up rather nicely the communist’s sense of faith, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. . . . Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear (KJV 11:1, 3).” Substitute the word History, Fate, or Dialectic for God, and you will understand how the proletarian communist understands his commitment to the revolution. This is, as we shall see, the secret appeal of communism to many Christians in the West. Christianity and communism provide answers to the question of meaning.

If we are to understand what communism is and the moral vision to which it aspires, we must consider the very real possibility that it is viewed by many as a modern substitute for Christianity. In communism, History replaces God, this-worldliness replaces other-worldliness, materialism replaces spiritualism, the dialectic replaces the Trinity, Marx replaces Jesus, Lenin replaces Paul, the bourgeoisie replaces the Pharisees, the proletariat replaces God’s chosen people, the Comintern replaces the Church, the Party replaces the Apostles, the hammer and sickle replaces the Cross, and the classless and stateless society replaces heaven.

In these ways and many more, I argue that communism is a Christian heresy that seeks to return Christianity to its ethical roots in the pure and unadulterated teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Let us not forget that Marx himself believed that Christianity prepared the way, morally and psychologically, for Marxism. Communism was born of the Christians’ unfulfilled duties. On this point, we might, alternatively, characterize communists as Christians in a hurry.

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The State’s Redemptive Power

Let us now dig deeper to explore other interstices between communism and Christianity. I should like to bring the reader’s attention to a couple of curious passages in Karl Marx’s “On the Jewish Question,” where Marx draws an interesting parallel between his philosophy and Christianity. (I have analyzed Marx’s essay “On the Jewish Question” in greater depth here and here.) Marx was, of course, a militant atheist and critic of all religion, but a deeper examination of his life and thought reveals a man driven by something like a messianic impulse, who sought to bring Jesus’s moral teaching down from the heavens and back to earth.

Marx was, first and foremost, as I have suggested already, a moral teacher, who believed that he had discovered a new scientific gospel based on the iron laws of history that would liberate humanity from its fallen state and resurrect man’s true self—his “species-being.” His essay “On the Jewish Question” reads as though it were a secular sermon diagnosing the fallen state of modern society, dismissing the political emancipation associated with classical liberalism as false prophecy, and pointing toward a new, totalizing path to redemption.

Marxism is obviously a radically different philosophy from Christianity in virtually every possible way, but it is interesting to note that Marx himself viewed his moral project as, in certain ways, a secularization of the Christian ethic. We can begin to see the parallels between Marx’s and Jesus’s philosophy by considering an interesting passage from “On the Jewish Question,” where Marx indicates how the modern secular State—and possibly the communist State—compares to Christ’s role in bringing man to a higher state of freedom:

The state is the intermediary between man and human liberty. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom man attributes all his own divinity and all his religious bonds, so the state is the intermediary to which man confides all his non-divinity and all his human freedom.

In other words, both the communist State and Christ the Redeemer are intermediaries between what man is in his corrupted, post-Fall, post-species-being state (i.e., driven by egoism and self-interest) and what he could or should be, namely, a man who sacrifices his selfish interests for the sake of others. Marx then goes on to indicate that the secular State of the modern world serves that same kind of role that Heaven plays for Christians:

The political state, in relation to civil society, is just as spiritual as is heaven in relation to earth. It stands in the same opposition to civil society, and overcomes it in the same manner as religion overcomes the narrowness of the profane world; i.e., it has always to acknowledge it again, re-establish it, and allow itself to be dominated by it.

The Marxian State is that spiritual place where men will go to have their species-being resurrected or born again. The goal of the Marxian State is to purge men of their artificial passions, desires, needs, and wants they’ve developed over time in civil society—e.g., the selfish desire for acquisition and private property.

Splitting the Differences

At a high level of abstraction, both Marxism and Christianity share desire to 1) eradicate selfishness or egoism from man’s soul and 2) restore the universal brotherhood of love and sharing. Before we get ahead of ourselves, though, let us consider a few other parallels between Christianity and Marxism.

1) There is in both communism and Christianity a sacred text, the Bible for the Christian and the writings of Marx for the communist. The common moral teachings of these sacred texts inspire a hatred of the rich, a love of the poor, a passion for righteousness, and a zeal for the universal brotherhood of man that often turns into fanaticism. Communists and Christians also require creedal uniformity to their core texts, which both sides believe to represent the final truth. Furthermore, both communists and Christians believe they are the chosen people with the power to lead all of humanity to a New Jerusalem that promises the final salvation, which is a kind of return to man’s original condition before the Fall, as expressed either when Adam and Eve ate fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or when early man developed a division of labor and created private property.

2) There is in both communism and Christianity a harmonious, propertyless, and unalienated state of existence where man’s true essence is to be found and later rediscovered and resurrected. For Christians, that time and place was the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve lived in a state of innocence and in communion with God; for Marx, that time and place was a hypothetical prehistoric stage of “tribal ownership” (see The German Ideology), where there were no classes, no State, and, most of all, no private property, and where men’s “species-conciousness” allowed them to live happily and harmoniously in communion with each other.

3) There is in both communism and Christianity, a singular moment that plunges mankind into a long history of selfish greed, suffering, conflict, and alienation. For Christians, that cataclysmic event was the moment when Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s command that they not eat fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and thereby entered into and bequeathed to all humanity a state of perpetual disobedience and sin; for Marx, that event was the moment that man claimed woman as his own (i.e., as property) and subsequently put a fence around a plot of land that he claimed as his own exclusive property, divided labor between men and women, and then introduced competition between men, all of which caused permanent class conflict and alienation in one form or another.

4) There is in communism and Christianity a shared belief that humanity will be redeemed by a Savior, who speaks for humanity, especially for the poor, suffering, and oppressed. For Christians, Jesus Christ was brought to earth to reveal God’s plan for man, to bear humanity’s sins, to model perfect obedience to God and selfless love, and to reconcile post-Fall man to God in his eternal kingdom; for Marxists, Karl Marx revealed the meaning, purpose, and forward direction of History (qua Fate), which was to palliate man’s suffering in the present, to restore man’s original need to sacrifice for the sake of the poor, needy, and the downtrodden, and to deliver him to the kingdom of freedom. Both communism and Christianity give men a reason to live and a reason to die.

5) There is in communism and Christianity a critique of existing power structures. Jesus, speaking on behalf of the poor, the meek, and the oppressed, challenged the religious, social, and political elites of his time (e.g., Pharisees, Sadducees, Roman imperial officials), condemning their greed, lust for power and wealth, and injustices (Matthew 23:13-36). Marx, speaking on behalf of the proletariat, challenged the bourgeoisie and the capitalist class for their greed, power lust, and exploitation of the working class. The Marxian version of original sin comes in the form of man’s selfish and unquenchable desire for private property, which means the greatest sinners are the largest holders of private property, namely, the bourgeoisie and the capitalist class, who seek to exploit the workers. The proletariat for Marx is, in turn, the modern version of the poor, the meek, and the downtrodden. Like Christ, he seeks to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and care for the sick. Like Jesus, Marx claims to speak for the poor and suffering who are victims of the egoistic, self-interested hucksters—the money changers—who worship the “worldly god,” namely, “money.” With Marx, the Kingdom of Heaven will be replaced by the Kingdom of Freedom, which is freedom from want.

6) There is in communism and Christianity the use of discipleship in which small groups of committed followers are tasked with changing the world. The teachings of Jesus and Marx were carried on after their respective deaths by a small cadre of acolytes whose common missions were to spread either the word of Christ or the gospel of Marx. For Christians, the Twelve Apostles were tasked with proclaiming the Gospel (the “good tidings” of salvation through Jesus), making disciples, baptizing, and teaching obedience to Christ’s commands (Luke 2:10-11, 46-47, 4:18-19; Matthew 28:19-20), and their mission was to spread the spiritual message of salvation, forgiveness of sins, and the coming Kingdom of God, building a community of believers rooted in faith and sacrificial love. For Marxists, the revolutionary Vanguard was tasked with educating the masses about the cause and nature of their oppression and with organizing and mobilizing the proletariat for the historically pre-ordained violent revolution to overthrow capitalism. The Vanguard, an elite corps of ideologically committed “intellectuals,” was to prepare the way for establishing a socialist state on the road to communism and the ultimate withering away of the State. Christ had his Paul and Marx had his Lenin.

7) There is in communism and Christianity a final resting place or what we might call the end of history. Whereas with Christianity the end is transcendent of time and space, communism puts it at some future date in an undetermined place. For the Christian, the sins of the individual must burn away; for the communist, the sins of society must fall off. In both utopias, humanity will have all it could ever need or want. There shall be no exploitation or suffering in the Christian heaven and in the communist society. In Isaiah 65:17-19, God announces:

For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. But be ye glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create: for, behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy. And I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and joy in my people: and the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of crying.

And then again in Revelation 21:1-4, John the Apostle announces the new heaven, an announcement reinforced by God’s own words. The message is clear: heaven shall be brought down to earth and made real for all living men and women.

And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.

Readers should note that the Book of Revelation talks of a “new earth,” and that new earth is a “new Jerusalem,” which has come down out of heaven and will be governed by God himself.

And so too with the communists. In 1932, an American missionary of communism William Z. Foster predicted that the arrival and adoption of the Marxist-Leninist ideology in America would result in “the most profound of all revolutions in history. The proletarian revolution would initiate “changes more rapid and far-reaching than any in the whole experience of mankind.”

The hundreds of millions of workers and peasants, striking off their age-old chains of slavery, will construct a society of liberty and prosperity and intelligence. Communism will inaugurate a new era for the human race.

Now, it is true that the differences between the Christian’s earthly Heaven and Marx’s classless and stateless society are seemingly night and day, but the point is that Marx felt the need to create a secular heaven where not individuals, but society passes from a state of corruption, degeneration, and suffering to a secular state of redemption and perfection. In both places, alienation and suffering will be eliminated.

The evidence seems clear: communism and Christianity are driven by a common vision of a future society in which men will be free, content, peaceful, and happy in living together. In Micah 4:3-4, it is said of the Lord that,

And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid: for the mouth of the LORD of hosts hath spoken it.

At the heart of Marx’s moral teaching is a radical redefinition of human salvation. The “human emancipation” or “human freedom” that Marx hopes will be achieved through the coming-into-being of the communist State and then the withering away of the State is the Marxian version of Christian salvation and earthly heaven. True emancipation and true freedom for Marx are not political concepts (i.e., to be emancipated politically and free from government coercion) but are, rather, psychological and moral concepts. Emancipation means the liberation from one’s selfish desires and freedom for the resurrected expression of one’s true communal self or species-being. In his The German Ideology, Marx describes his idyllic communist society in the following terms:

While in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Marx’s messianic narrative culminates, like the Bible, with a promise of a restored humanity. For Christianity, the Kingdom of Heaven is a state of perfect harmony and communion with God. For Marx, the eventual withering away of the communist State results in the Kingdom of Freedom, which is a state of perfect harmony and communion between men. It is a millenarian secular state of brotherly love and harmony, where all human contradictions, resentments, and hatreds are resolved. In the Christian heaven, men are reunited with God. In Marx’s secular heaven, men are reunited first with their true selves and then with each other. Marx’s vision of an ego-less, selfless, classless, stateless community of brotherly love is his version of a secular New Jerusalem.

None of this, of course, either the Christian or communist vision of a future defined by universal brotherhood and freedom, is much more than a literary flourish that bears little relationship to reality. Not surprisingly, both the Old and New Testament Prophets and the communist theoreticians are curiously reticent about the exact nature of their classless societies. In both cases, there will be a material redistribution of wealth from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs. Freedom, happiness, and the unity of all men will follow in these perfect conditions. Beyond these glittering generalities, there’s not much more to know.

Conclusion

This essay concludes, then, with the question posed by V. I. Lenin in the title of his famous book: What is to be Done?

This question is not mine to answer, although I will say that communism is a plague on human civilization. This demonstrable fact must be addressed by those Christians (including my Christian friends) who oppose socialism and communism. It is your responsibility to either show me that I am wrong, or to show your fellow Christians who support communism, socialism, or even the liberal welfare state that they are wrong—morally wrong. Everything depends on it.

I look forward to the conversation.

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A MAN FOR THE CHILDREN. If you understand this video, you will understand why he won. Listen to the voices of these young boys:

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ARCHEOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGY ROUND UP

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THE BAD

THE SILENT KILLER, OR, WHAT CAN’T GO ON FOREVER, WON’T:

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• England is a Total Disgrace

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THE UGLY

SAYING THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD:

I’M NOT EVEN A CHRISTIAN AND I FIND THIS AESTHETICALLY GROTESQUE AND MORALLY UGLY. It’s nihilism on display:

THIS IS WHAT DECLINE AND FALL LOOKS LIKE:

AND THE “ARTIST” . . . BUT OF COURSE:

. . . AND THE BEAUTIFUL

A BEAUTIFUL SCORE AND SOUNDTRACK FROM A BEAUTIFUL FILM:

Have a great week!

***This will be my last post for a couple of weeks. Big things are happening at my day job for the next few weeks that require my full attention. I’ve also been asked to review three book manuscripts, and I have to write two commissioned essays. I need to focus on these responsibilities and projects for the next few weeks. When I return, I hope to get b…

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***Late breaking news!

Today’s post arrives as something of a shock, even for me.

On Sunday, I started preparing an issue of “Dumb and Dumber” for today’s delivery. As I was doing my daily scan through the news cycle, I stumbled upon an online newspaper article that left my jaw on the floor.

What follows further below is one of the more bizarre experiences of my life, and it’s certainly the most bizarre experience in the history of this publication.

More on all this anon.

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Before I share with you this deeply unsettling story, let me set the broader context, at least my personal context.

Those of you who have subscribed to The Redneck Intellectual since our launch in November 2020 know that I have received my fair share of abusive phone messages, unhinged emails, and the occasional nasty comment left here in the comments section at TRI. All of that is to be expected and is almost always amusing. Some of you also know that I have been threatened every now and then, either with physical violence or threats to my livelihood. You need a thick skin in this line of work.

I first started receiving these kinds of threats in the late 1990s when I was a young faculty member teaching at a small college in Ohio. I had a semi-regular column in the local newspaper and some of my op-eds would get picked up occasionally by the national and international press. In those days, I was mostly writing on K-12 education issues.

The positive responses to my essays relative to the negative ones always ran at a rate of about ten to one, but the “one” was almost always nuts or worse. Rarely if ever did I receive a thoughtful criticism. At a minimum, the negative notes and phone messages were abusive in one way or another, but some letters (email and snail mail) were sometimes more than snide, abusive, or defamatory. Some threatened my livelihood, my physical well being, my property, and some went so far as to wish ill upon my family.

Here are a few examples of my life back in the day.

The wife of a local school board member once sent a nasty letter to the president of my college demanding that I be fired because I had written an article denouncing the so-called “whole-language” method of teaching children how not to read, and I defended phonics as the only true method for teaching children how to read.

Shortly thereafter, the then Provost of same said college sent me a threatening letter for writing an op-ed calling for the shuttering of America’s so-called “Education Schools.” The Provost’s letter clearly suggested that my promotion to full professor would not be looked upon favorably if I continued to think, speak, and write. Silly me.

In response to the Provost’s threat, I was assisted by the academic free-speech organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). FIRE wrote a devastatingly brutal letter to the Provost. She was subsequently forced by the president of the college to take me out to lunch and apologize for her behavior. She was soon thereafter fired (as it were).

During those forgettable years, I received physical threats against my person to which I did not paid much attention. I have a vague recollection of once finding a threatening note on my car in the driveway at home. I drew the line, however, when one person sent me a letter telling me that he hoped my “daughter would die of a gut-wrenching illness.” My then five-year-old daughter was in fact suffering from a chronic “gut-wrenching illness.” That was the first time that I actually called the police, who did in fact visit said person. The gentleman (I use the term loosely) later sent a note of apology.

A few years later, I gave a talk at a college in Pennsylvania that required police protection. The local teachers’ union had read one of my education op-eds and sent ominous threats to the college hoping that my speech would be cancelled. I remember giving the talk with a police officer standing on each side of the podium, protecting me from the baying mob. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed giving a talk as much as that one.

Fast forward to 2020, the year I published my “The Pajama-Boy Nietzscheans” essay, which was followed shortly thereafter by three more essays on that queerly-named fellow, the Bronze Age Pervert (see here, here, and here). Mr. Pervert was not happy with the essays and set loose his BAP Boys, who sent me hundreds of abusive emails, messages, phone messages, and emails.

One of the tough guys (always writing under a pseudonym) published this Tweet in reference to yours truly:

And then a real nutter posted the following series of threats:

More recently, the threats have escalated to a new level. As I wrote in “Welcome to My World” (an essay cataloging some of the abuse I had received for writing two essays in defense of Jonathan Yudelman, i.e., “Who Will Defend Jonathan Yudelman?” and “The Yudelman Affair”), a troublesome trend clearly seems to be developing in America.

Intellectual, political, and religious differences are not to be tolerated. They’re to be obliterated. All must think alike. All must toe the party line. All must obey. All must bend the knee. Those who don’t must be defamed, threatened, hurt, ruined, or, as we all now know, murdered. Coercive force and violence have replaced thought, logic, proof, persuasion, and, most of all, good will.

More recently, in response to my “Nihilism and the Crisis of the West” essay, someone named John Jacob left not-so-veiled threatening comments in the comments section here at TRI.

A good friend of mine, a retired naval officer, has told me repeatedly that I should be reporting all of the threats to local law enforcement. I’ve always pooh-poohed his suggestions on the grounds that Mrs. Redneck is armed to her teeth (what few teeth she has left), locked-and-loaded, and ready to defend her man (well, most of the time or at least some of the time). That always seemed good enough to me—until now.

We all now know that America is a different place today than it was even in 2020, particularly in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. The world is full of psychologically unbuttoned political lunatics, who have crossed the psychological Rubicon between civilization and barbarism.

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And now, finally, on to the story of the day.

A few years ago, there was a self-evidently disturbed person on this site who would occasionally read some of The Redneck Intellectual’s essays and leave crazy comments. His name is Lorenz Kraus. His comments were typically snarky, abusive, and most often just plain kooky—and I mean really kooky. To be clear: not just a little bit kooky but a lot kooky. Eventually, I banned him from commenting at The Redneck Intellectual.

I thought I was done with him forever—until today.

This morning, as I was scanning the news, I ran across a headline that caught my eye: “Man arrested after confessing to killing his parents in TV interview.” I opened the link and read in dismay.

The article tells the story of a 53-year-old man who confessed during a TV interview a few days ago to murdering his parents in their home in 2017. He admitted to burying his mother and father in their backyard two days later, and he also admitted to collecting their Social Security checks for the last eight years.

The murderer’s name is Lorenz Kraus, and, yes, it’s the same Lorenz Kraus who has been a troll here at The Redneck Intellectual. Some of you even engaged with him. Thankfully, he was arrested immediately after the interview.

I’m linking below to Kraus’s TV confession, and I’m also providing screen shots of the statement he wanted to share with the world after his arrest. The reasons he gives in the interview for murdering his parents are, at a minimum, morally repugnant rationalizations and no doubt lies. Of his intellectually deranged written declaration, I can make no sense of it, nor do I care to. It’s bonkers.

Here is Lorenz Kraus’ Interview and Confession

And here is Kraus’ Written Statement on his “Creed”

Yes, the murderer who wrote this insane screed was actually on this site leaving equally insane comments. I have no time or patience for this lunacy. If y’all would like to figure out the meaning of his screed in the comments section, please go ahead. I will not attempt to make sense of it.

I now have a newly-found appreciation for the recommendations of my Navy friend, who cautioned me to protect myself and my family. Mrs. Redneck has been given the green light to restock her arsenal.

Let me say this loudly and clearly: Any person found to be abusive or threatening in the comments section here at The Redneck Intellectual will be banned forever. Same for those who send me threatening private messages. I will report you to the police. Lastly, I will also make you famous by publicly posting your written comments or voicemails here at TRI.

I shall return next week to our regular programming.

(Afterthought: This past weekend, I dug out of a buried box in the basement my correspondence with that former Provost from the spring and summer of 2000. As I reread our exchange of letters, I was reminded of the fact, and with a modest degree of pride, that I had done the right thing. I chose the road of principle with my career on the line and didn’t waver. I also found and reread a scolding letter from a now former friend and colleague denouncing me for my “imprudence.” He wrote that he agreed with my positions (e.g., defending children against Progressive education), but that it was imprudent to state them publicly. His letter was a reminder of how prudence is often a cover for pragmatism and how pragmatism is often a cover for cowardice. I would later write a book inspired by my experiences during those years. The book is titled Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea.)

I regret nothing. I chose the road less travelled, as Robert Frost once wrote, and that choice “has made all the difference.”

Be well, my friends!