The month of May has mercifully arrived. That means the end of the spring semester nationwide at our university asylums. It also means that the campus crazies are heading home to harangue their parents and hometowns with the crackpot theories they’ve learned at their liberal colleges over the last year. Mom and Dad can see what that $60K tuition bought them. Maybe it will purchase the vandalizing of a statue in the town square this summer. The guys and gals and various other gender identities at places like Columbia, UCLA, and George Washington University can now gear up for the next grand event on the activist calendar: Pride Month. This year, however, they added a new “ism” to their roster of activism: antisemitism. They might be tempted to list that new skill in their resume under the heading “DEI,” but I suggest they list it under “CRT.” After all, critical race theory has provided the critical superstructure for this new antisemitism. The Not-So-Secret Marxist Roots of CRT Critical race theory hails from Marxist critical theory. In the text of the Wikipedia definition of CRT, you won’t see a single mention of Marxism, though the first paragraph correctly notes that CRT derives from critical theory. It states: “The word critical in the name is an academic reference to critical theory.” Interestingly, if you click the “critical theory” hyperlink in that definition, you’ll magically discover dozens of references to Marxism there. That’s because, critical theory comes out of Marxism, namely, the Frankfurt School, and so does its bastard son, critical race theory. The Wikipedia makers can do their damnedest to purge mentions of Marxism from their whitewashed definition of CRT; in fact, quite strikingly. Nonetheless, that concealment eventually falls apart under the truth of reality. (Watch this discussion of CRT and its Marxist roots that we did at Grove City College in September 2022.) CRT borrows from Marxism simply and clearly: It takes the basic model of oppressed vs. oppressor in classical Marxism, which was the proletariat vs. the bourgeoisie, and replaces the two classes with two races, white vs. black. (RELATED: Tragic Farce: The Origins and Destiny of Critical Theory) That’s the Marxist framework. It’s acknowledged by anyone who non-emotionally studies this stuff — and those who do should be very troubled by its current application to the Jewish people of Israel and their struggle against Hamas terrorism. The Pedagogy of the Oppressed Jews, and especially liberal Jews in universities, are distraught to discover that they’re being hammered into this simplistic Marxist binary by CRT advocates. Because CRT simpletons are such, well, idiotic simpletons, they shoehorn you into one of two skin-color categories, which is difficult to impossible to do for the vast majority of 21st-century homo sapiens who are products of multiple ethnic backgrounds going back centuries and millennia. Nonetheless, the framework is the framework, and the CRT crazy is hellbent on the model. Thus, following the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Jews have been aghast to find themselves curiously shoved into the white/oppressor category, whereas their attackers from Hamas/Gaza have been inserted into the other racial category (the approved/victim category) by our intrepid university liberals. The category for Hamas/Gazans wouldn’t be “black” but it’s some form of “brown” or “person of color” or, one surmises, “non-white.” Hence, Jews/Israel, are bad; they are the oppressors. Hamas/Gazans, are good; they are the oppressed. To borrow from the inane work of the late Brazilian Marxist maniac Paulo Freire, read by every education major over the last 50 years, this is their pedagogy of the oppressed. Candidly, many of the college kids in the mobs aren’t even fully aware that they’re part of a movement that borrows from this broader Marxist framework. They’re the naive innocents that communists would call the “popular front” or dupes or useful idiots. For them to fully comprehend what they’re doing, the Marxists would say that they need careful “consciousness-raising.” If you’re late to this theater and somewhat incredulous at how this is happening on campuses right now with Jews in the crosshairs, I suggest some reading and research from those who have been sniffing out this ideological rot. Some really good work is being done by liberal Jewish scholars who have been tracking this phenomenon and trying to warn the world. I especially recommend a superb journal article by Suzanna Sherry, a prominent, liberal professor at Vanderbilt University Law School. Her scholarly paper, “DEI and Antisemitism: Bred in the Bone,” is a must-read. You can also read the work by George Mason University Law Professor David Bernstein (here and here), by attorney Russell A. Shalev of the International Legal Forum, and (among others) pieces in the Jewish Times and Jerusalem Post. All of this work exposes the antisemitism in both CRT and DEI. To quote just one, Russell Shalev’s legal paper explains it succinctly: Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Intersectionality understand society as comprised of overlapping and interconnected levels of racial oppression. Critical Race Theory simplistically erases the uniqueness of the Jewish experience and identifies Jews as “white”, CRT’s oppressor class. In fact, CRT often considers Jews to the be the epitome of white privilege and supremacy…. Jews are considered as beneficiaries of white privilege, and not a minority group, so attacks on them do not merit the same concern as on other groups. In fact, attacks on Jewish self-determination and self-identification are seen as anti-racist. What’s especially absurd about this new project that places Jews as oppressors is that there has never been any group of people in the history of humanity who have been persecuted more than Jews. They’re not history’s oppressors; they’re history’s victims, of pogroms, of purges, of the Holocaust. There are only about 15 million of them in the world today. Hitler killed almost half of them in less than 10 years.  This Isn’t About the Oppressed. It’s About Race. Jews had a healthy, vigorous population at the time of the ancient Roman empire. If not for repeated rounds of persecution, exile, and outright “liquidation” over thousands of years, there surely would be hundreds of millions of Jews today (one estimate is that there would be 32 million Jews today if not for Hitler’s Holocaust, which I think is a very conservative figure). But there’s not, because they’ve been targeted for annihilation throughout history. The only truly safe haven that Jews ever had was the United States of America and the modern nation-state of Israel created in May 1948 with the approval of the United Nations. If you want to play the oppressor vs. oppressed game, Jews would absolutely merit the latter category. But that’s not the game played by CRT. For the critical race theorist, what matters most is your race. That’s the determinative, decisive factor — just as for Marx and Engels and Lenin your class was the determinative, decisive factor (ironically the same was true for Hitler). Jews today are handily dubbed “white” in this convenient calculus. Think about the absurdity: Our “higher” educated, enlightened “anti-racists” look at the peoples of Palestine, Jews and Arabs alike, with all of their incredible history, filled with nuance and complexity and a million machinations, and boil them down to white vs. non-white. Can you imagine anything more demeaning, more dehumanizing, more simplistic, and more racist? Critical race theory is just that. It is rotten, toxic, idiotic. It divides people, quite literally, into hostile, opposing, antagonistic camps pitted against one another based on skin color. It assumes you think and behave and exist a certain way because of the color of your skin. It’s downright racist — yes, ironically, it’s precisely what it claims to oppose. As I’ve noted, it’s exacted what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. opposed, as he wanted all of God’s children to be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. (RELATED: Teach MLK, Not CRT) Yet, it’s raging among the ideological mobs at the universities. When you feed this bile to college students, don’t be surprised when angry mobs erupt on campus. The post Critical Race Theory Is Behind Campus Rioting appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

A new book — or, rather, a reprint edition of a not-so-new book — has got me cogitating about the classic Broadway musicals. This, given many of the less than delightful things that one finds oneself compelled to think about these days, is quite a benison. To be sure, although I grew up with the cast albums of many of those evergreen shows and can honestly confess that I love every last one of them, my love isn’t entirely uncritical. If from a certain perspective, for instance, my affection for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific and The King and I is a bit less qualified than my fondness for their Oklahoma! and Carousel, it’s because Curly (the hero of Oklahoma!) is a simpleton and Billy Bigelow (the hero of Carousel) is a thug, whereas Emile de Becque (the love interest in South Pacific) has class and courage and the King of Siam (despite his ruthless side) is a man of substance and complexity with noble ambitions for his country. Then there’s this: Carousel and Lerner and Loewe’s Brigadoon have what may be the two most gorgeous (and beautifully arranged) scores ever, but they also have two of the stupidest premises: The former imagines a deity called “The Starkeeper” who stands on a ladder putting stars in the sky, as if on the top of a Christmas tree; the latter is set in a Scottish village whose inhabitants wake up every morning a century later than the day before, the consequence of a miracle prayed for by the addlepated local minister in the hopes that it would protect them from outside influence. This solution, unsurprisingly, proves itself to be imbecilic after only two days — i.e., two centuries. Still, how much can you beat up on a show that includes “Waitin’ for My Dearie,” “The Heather on the Hill,” “There But for You Go I,” and “Almost Like Being in Love”? (READ MORE: Film Noir Made Me Conservative) Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady, based on Shaw’s Pygmalion, is widely considered to be the ultimate Broadway musical. But Professor Higgins, who’s supposed to be an expert linguist and a persnickety perfectionist when it comes to proper usage, is given a few lines to sing that are not just grammatically godawful but downright inelegant. For example, when he expresses his deep-seated misogyny in “An Ordinary Man,” he sings: “I’d be equally as willing for a dentist to be drilling / Than to ever let a woman in my life.” For one thing, “equally as willing” is glaringly non-standard; either “equally willing” or “as willing” would suffice. For another, whether you go with “equally” or “as,” starting the second line with “than” throws another stick into the spokes, grammatically speaking. Plus, a stickler like Higgins would be very unlikely to opt for the split infinitive “to ever let.” And what kind of English is “a dentist to be drilling”? Yet this genuinely lousy lyric made it through 2,717 performances on the show’s initial run (beginning in 1956), survived the movie version, and has presumably remained unchanged in innumerable Broadway revivals, in countless major productions on the West End and elsewhere, and in mountings by schools and local theater groups all over the world, even though it could easily have been improved at any point along the way. A few quick suggestions, none of them stellar, but all of them preferable to the original:  “I would find it less alarming to be forced to take up farming / Than to ever let a woman in my life.”   “I’d prefer an awful ailment or the deadliest derailment / Than, etc.”   “I’d much rather share a sherry with a chap with dysentery / Than, etc.”  You’re welcome. No charge. What of the other Broadway classics? Guys and Dolls is perfect — every song a gem. Frank Loesser even removed five (five!) top-notch tunes from the stage version (including “A Bushel and a Peck,” which my mother sang to me when I was a baby) to make room for three new, equally fantastic songs in the movie version (including “Adelaide” and “A Woman in Love”). A Little Night Music is sheer genius. Also terrific: Sweeney Todd, Gypsy, Fiddler on the Roof. I have a love/hate relationship with Evita (which, strictly speaking, isn’t a Broadway show because it was written by a couple of Brits and premiered on the West End before moving to New York): On the one hand, the movie version is a boffo two-hour-plus music video containing some first-rate melodies and a performance by Madonna that’s especially creditable, even miraculous, given that in every other film she’s appeared in, she obviously can’t act; on the other hand, it’s never made clear to us why we should share the character Che’s consistently snotty attitude toward the title character. (Incidentally, he’s supposedly called Che because it’s sort of the Argentinian equivalent of “pal” or “buddy”; but of course, the name brings to mind the vile Che Guevara, leading us to wonder throughout whether we’re being encouraged to share Guevara’s take on Peronism, which, whatever its deficiencies, was fiercely anti-Communist.) Plus, all too many of Tim Rice’s lyrics are staggeringly wince-worthy. A typical line refers to the radio as “the sound radio” because Rice needed an extra syllable; another says of the young Evita, with incredible awkwardness, that “there was nowhere she’d been at the age of fifteen”; later, instead of using the actual expression “what’s cooking,” Evita sings the cringe-inducing line “I already know what cooks,” because Rice needs a rhyme for “looks.”  (READ MORE: World War True) Then there’s West Side Story, which is, well, West Side Story, and wonderful in its way, but even the lyricist himself, Stephen Sondheim, admitted regretting that in “I Feel Pretty” he gives lyrics to the heroine, Maria (e.g., “it’s alarming how charming I feel”), that don’t sound entirely natural coming out of the mouth of a girl just off the boat from Puerto Rico. Which reminds me: in one song in South Pacific, Nellie Forbush calls herself a “little hick,” only to then toss off, in another song, the ten-dollar word “bromidic” (which sounds more suited to Professor Higgins than to a callow nurse from Little Rock). Speaking of hicks, Oklahoma!, in addition to having a dopey hero, pushes my tolerance for Broadway’s almost inevitably condescending take on homespun country types, notwithstanding its immortal songs and pathbreaking theatrical status.  A Midwestern Show for a Midwestern Man This brings us, finally, to The Music Man, with book, music, and lyrics by Meredith Willson. On the hick-o-meter, it scores even higher than Oklahoma! I mean, if you want to be Midwestern, fine. Just don’t shove it in everybody’s face. (Kidding! Kidding!) But Willson wasn’t some born-and-bred New Yorker like Rodgers or Hammerstein trying to figure out how people talked and thought and lived out there in the dreary, dusty, distant hinterlands far beyond the Hudson; he was the real thing. He intended The Music Man to be a tribute to his beloved native state, Iowa, and to the folks in his hometown of Mason City (on which River City was modeled). Granted, two of the songs, intended to capture Hawkeye State-talk, are, to me at least, beyond annoying: “Pickalittle (Talk-a-Little)” and “Shipoopi.” I’m not crazy about that widely celebrated “Rock Island” number at the beginning, either — a bunch of traveling salesmen yakking repetitively to the rhythm of the train they’re riding. (Excerpt: “Ya can talk, ya can talk, ya can bicker, ya can talk, / ya can bicker, bicker, bicker, ya can talk, ya can talk, / ya can talk, talk, talk, talk, bicker, bicker, bicker.”) While I’m at it, I could also do without the barbershop quartet.  All that being said, now that I — like Rodgers and Hammerstein, a born-and-bred New Yorker — have lived for over a decade in a burg of 13,000 souls (Mason City today is just over twice that), I must admit that the small-town values celebrated in The Music Man have grown on me. Not that I was ever less than utterly charmed by the thing. (After all, I spent my childhood summers in a South Carolina town with a population of around 25,000.) Even as a kid, I was delighted to discover that the jaunty march “Seventy-Six Trombones” and the sentimental waltz ballad “Goodnight, My Someone” — which two songs could be more different? — had virtually the same melody. I was similarly impressed by the way in which “Lida Rose” and “Will I Ever Tell You” were written to be sung in counterpoint. Also, “Till There Was You” is one of the undying love songs. In short, it’s a remarkably sweet show that taught me one or two things about the magic of music. I appreciate it even more after reading the book to which I alluded at the outset of this piece. “But He Doesn’t Know the Territory”: The Story behind Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, written by Willson himself, was first published in 1959 and was recently reissued with a foreword by Michael Feinstein, the internationally celebrated piano man, and Great American Songbook connoisseur, who quite rightly observes that Willson’s memoir “is one of the best-documented chronicles illustrating the collaborative process of birthing a musical.” In the case of The Music Man, that process was long and tough. When it began, Willson was just short of 50. He’d spent his life as a musician, orchestra leader, and radio personality; he’d written songs like “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas” and “May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You”; he’d been nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Original Score (for Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and William Wyler’s The Little Foxes); and he’d played flute and piccolo both in John Philip Sousa’s band and the New York Philharmonic under the baton of Arturo Toscanini. Then, in 1951, the Broadway production team of Ernie Martin and Cy Feuer suggested he try his hand at a musical comedy based on his Iowa boyhood. The Music Man opened in 1957. During the intervening six years, Willson went through dozens of drafts (several of which clocked in at well over four hours) and put on dozens of auditions for producers, directors, lighting designers, actors, and potential backers — not to mention their spouses, assistants, secretaries, entourages, and assorted hangers-on. (READ MORE: Gustav Klimt’s Last Painting Was Among His Best) Some of those auditions went off like a dream; others were nightmares. Among the celebrities who were left cold by The Music Man was the playwright Moss Hart, whose own superb Broadway memoir, Act One, was published in the same year as Willson’s; choreographer Bob Fosse turned down the project because “the score all sounded alike to him.” The actors who passed on the leading role of Harold Hill — which boosted Robert Preston to stardom — included Gene Kelly and Danny Kaye. One of the things that make Willson’s memoir so charming (and so Midwestern) is that he has absolutely nothing negative to say about any of these people — or, for that matter, about anyone. “The first production meeting” on The Music Man, he maintains, “glistened with a special kind of professionalism I’ve never run into anywhere else but Broadway.” Other showbiz autobiographies are full of petty score-settling — stories about how producer X is a back-stabber, director Y a slave-driver, and actress Z a scene-stealer (and a slut, to boot). There’s nothing remotely like that here: Everybody Willson meets is a saint, a sweetheart, a softie. (“Outside of a couple people like Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer,” he asserts, “the truly professional Broadway dancer is the most dedicated human of our time.”) In other words, his memoir is as wholesome as his musical. And you know what? It makes for a delightful escape from the nasty and brutish world of 2024.  From the very beginning, certain people — foremost among them Willson’s then-wife, Rini — were full-throated champions of The Music Man and confident that he’d eventually work out the kinks and end up with a smash hit. But right up to the opening night, many of those closest to the production weren’t all that sure. What on earth, for instance, would sophisticated habitués of the Great White Way make of a song that starts like this?: Oh the Wells Fargo Wagon is a coming down the street Oh please let it be for me Oh the Wells Fargo Wagon is a coming down the street I wish I wish I knew what it could be I got a box of maple sugar on my birthday In March I got a grey mackinaw And once I got some grapefruit from Tampa Montgom’ry Ward sent me a bathtub and a cross cut saw Let’s face it, it makes “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” look like “C’est Magnifique.” Indeed, after an unpromising benefit preview just before the show’s official Broadway debut, the author William Saroyan, dining at Sardi’s, overheard some defeatist talk about its prospects. Strolling over to a member of the production team, Saroyan declared that The Music Man was “one of the great pieces of Americana” that would win every award up for grabs. Saroyan (whose novel The Human Comedy is itself a more than noteworthy dose of pure Americana) was right, of course. Meredith Willson’s immortal musical is so American that, as Feinstein notes in his foreword, it’s “not an international show compared to other Broadway blockbusters; while it is performed in other countries, most of the interest is domestic.” Which, needless to say, seems nothing less than deeply, beautifully fitting.  The post A Broadway Memoir With Midwestern Sensibilities appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

May 5 was the snowiest day of California’s 2023-2024 season, with an accumulation of 26.4 inches. The UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab also pegged March 3 as the second-snowiest day, with 23.8 inches, forcing motorists to put on chains. Furnaces were firing up and there was no need for air conditioning in the Central Valley, which is normally quite hot in May. The sudden chill and record snowfall brought no pronouncement from Gov. Gavin Newsom, who believes the world is getting hotter. As temperatures plunged, Gov. Newsom was planning a trip to the May 15–17 “From Climate Crisis to Climate Resilience” conference at the Vatican. (READ MORE: Thermal Runaway: How Hawaii’s Green Obsession Exacerbated the Worst American Wildfire in a Century) According to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences: “The Climate Crisis is upon us. It will get lot worse over the next few decades as planetary heating shoots past 1.5C by early 2030s. The warming curve is likely to bend around the latter half of this century in response to global scale actions to mitigate emissions of the heat trapping pollutants. We no longer have the luxury of relying just on mitigation of emissions. We need to embark on building climate resilience so that people can bend the emissions curve and bounce back from the climate crisis safer, healthier, wealthier to a sustainable world,” and so on. The climate “crisis” — formerly known as “global warming” — is a matter of debate; there are challenges to the “hockey stick graph” of allegedly rising temperatures. Nonetheless, for the Vatican, this seems to be a matter of dogma — the same is true of Gov. Newsom, who is not a scientist. ‘Something Happened to the Plumbing of the World’ Newsom attended Santa Clara University on a “partial baseball scholarship” and graduated in 1989 with a degree in political science — which is not the same as empirical science, a matter of measurement, testing, and replication. The debates on global warming seem to have passed by the governor. In 2021, when much of California was ablaze, Gov. Newsom blamed climate change. “The hots are getting hotter, the dries are getting drier,” Gov. Newsom explained, “something happened to the plumbing of the world. Climate change is real and exacerbating this.” According to Wade Crowfoot, Gov. Newsom’s natural resources secretary, “If we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting Californians.” Those vulnerable Californians had cause to wonder. (READ MORE: Trillion Tree Trickery: The Sad Truth About Tree Planting for Climate Change and Diversity) Wade Crowfoot graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1996 with a degree in political science and, in 2004, earned his master’s degree in public policy — not atmospheric science. Crowfoot was deputy cabinet secretary to Gov. Jerry Brown and served as West Coast director for the Environmental Defense Fund. Secretary Crowfoot and Gov. Newsom seem unaware of studies such as the 2019 California Wildfires: Key Recommendations to Prevent Future Disasters, which faulted state and federal agencies “for allowing fuel conditions to persist that enabled so many wildfires to reach epic proportions.” Recommendations include proactive forest management; more prescribed or controlled burns, and allowing property owners “to more easily remove trees and provide active forest management through forest thinning and the creation of breaks, especially near communities.” Such common-sense measures have found little favor with the California government, which remains shrink-wrapped in climate-change dogma. For his part, Gov. Newsom is locked into other views that might seem out of step with the Vatican. Newsom Breaks From Rome for Political Gain Santa Clara University bills itself as “the Jesuit University in Silicon Valley,” that is to say, a Catholic institution. In March, the Vatican announced that “in the era of universal human rights, there can be no ‘right’ to take a human life,” and “in this phase of history, the protection of life becomes an absolute priority.” For Gov. Newsom, the absolute priority is abortion at any time, for any reason. The literature on abortion includes books such as Aborting America, by former abortionist Bernard Nathanson, and recent advances in surgery on the unborn. Those realities seem to have bypassed Gov. Newsom, a father of four. (WATCH: The Spectacle Ep. 98: These Are the Monsters of Our Society) In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution says nothing about abortion, a matter for the states to decide. Following that decision, as Mary Theroux noted, “many seized the opportunity to grandstand politically — and none so blatantly as California’s Governor Newsom. Newsom has run billboard ads in 18 states to promote California as an abortion sanctuary and launched a website. That goes far beyond the notion that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” For Gov. Newson,  unrestricted abortion is a dogma. So is climate change, even when the facts go against it, as they did in California on a chilly May weekend. If Californians thought the governor puts politics over facts it would be hard to blame them. Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. The post Newsom Believes the Globe Is Getting Hotter Even as California Freezes appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The church is shrinking, but it’s getting stronger as well. That is the paradox afoot on the American religious scene. The number of unchurched — “nones” and “dones” — are skyrocketing, while the remainers, the ones who stick it out, are becoming more devout — smaller but better. These young people are looking for something different, something unlike their workaday lives. It’s bad for the church — the visible, institutional church. And it’s good for the church — the hidden church, the body of Christ, the assembly of believers gathered by the gospel. The first part is easily corroborated. Study after study shows that the exodus out the church doors is profound. By now everybody has heard the news, so we can recap. The seven sisters of the mainline, as the seven traditional Protestant old-line denominations are called, have lost substantial membership in the past 20 years, some by over half. The Disciples of Christ are down 57.25 percent in membership from 2000 to 2020. In that same time period, the Presbyterian Church USA has dropped by 50.68 percent; the United Church of Christ, 43 percent; the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 38.6 percent; the Episcopal Church, 32.42 percent; the United Methodist Church, 24.4 percent; and the American Baptist Church, 21.7 percent. (READ MORE from Tom Raabe: Biden, Trash-Talker in Chief) But the decline has hit America’s largest Christian denomination as well — the Catholic Church. According to a recent study, following the COVID pandemic only 17 percent of Catholic adults go to Mass every week — down from over 24 percent before the virus. The number for millennials is 9 percent. Many are the reasons proffered for the exodus. Some seem nonspiritual – parishioners move and don’t adopt another congregation in their new location; the services aren’t at convenient times so they stop attending; they simply get out of the habit; COVID put them on their couches for online worship and, post-virus, they never roused themselves from the cushions. Some see church as providing only community, and they can find that elsewhere — heck, every morning down at the local Cracker Barrel if community per se is all they’re after. The factors associated with a rising secularism have also taken a toll. The attack on religion, the attempt to strip religious views from the public square, the rise of scientific explanations for life’s big questions that leave no room for God have all moved people out of the pews. But there is also the redundancy factor. Catholicism is victim to the same social factors as mainline Protestantism. Many priests, as their Protestant peers, deliver sermons regaling social-justice warriors and damning conservatives as the reactionary spawn of the devil. It has been that way for decades now, and as the church becomes more progressive, more political, more social-justice-oriented, it becomes less theological. Doctrine becomes emasculated; beliefs become personal opinions, “my truths,” and no longer binding on the masses. The church in this world seems more and more unnecessary. It serves as a redundancy system — a backup network of fellow travelers who meet once a week to reinforce political and social allegiance. Sure, there are a few comforting rituals … maybe some favorite songs to sing, the familiar liturgical rubrics, empty now of meaning but still producing the warm religious fuzzies. But eventually, the whole enterprise becomes tangential. It adds a religious skin to the political pudding the attender is in reality invested in. It doesn’t provide anything more, or other, or unique or different, than the political and social networks he already accesses. And the churchgoer becomes a “done.” He doesn’t need it anymore; it’s redundant. (READ MORE: The LGBTQ Conquest of America) Unfortunately, it is just these churchgoers who have inculcated their offspring in the idea that religion is optional and requiring of no moral obligation. They passed the faith down to the next generation as not a vital and crucial — and certainly not eternally necessary — aspect of life. The result is the meteoric rise of the “nones.” These are they who do not identify with any religion; they’re atheists, agnostics, or nothing in particular, and they constitute almost 30 percent of the population. And they’re young — 65 percent are under 50 years old — and comprise a lot of millennials and Gen Z (44 percent of millennials and 45 percent of Gen Z are nones). It’s the second side of the paradox — that a stripped-down church is reclaiming a vibrant, electric faith — that is the new news. An Associated Press article by Tim Sullivan dropped a few days ago extolling just this side of the paradox. Quoting from the article: Across the U.S., the Catholic Church is undergoing an immense shift. Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change, with the promise of eternal salvation replaced by guitar Masses, parish food pantries and casual indifference to church doctrine. The shift, molded by plummeting church attendance, increasingly traditional priests and growing numbers of young Catholics searching for more orthodoxy, has reshaped parishes across the country, leaving them sometimes at odds with Pope Francis and much of the Catholic world. The article focuses on a resurgent conservative Catholic piety, driven by young believers enamored of what the writer calls “the old ways” — by which is meant a return to ancient, traditional music; priests donning traditional garb, like cassocks; more sermons concerned with sin and confession and church doctrine; and the Latin Mass, along with more incense and more Gregorian chants. These young people are looking for something different, something unlike their workaday lives. Said Ben Rouleau, quoted in the AP article: “We want this ethereal experience that is different from everything else in our lives.” This is one of the forgotten attractions of traditional, even liturgical, worship. It’s different. The modern church, the institution that is now obsessed with informality, wants to push on its members the same quotidian attitudes and styles they imbibe all week long. The sermon resembles a TED talk; the music is Christian Top 40; the attire is business casual, or worse, weekend casual. What those returning to orthodoxy are saying is, of the 168 hours in a week, give us one, just one, where we can remember our spiritual heritage, where we can flee the lives of the other 167 and access worship in the ancient forms. Where we can connect in worship with the saints before us, who centuries before sang the same Sanctus, the same Agnus Dei, that we sing today. (READ MORE: Courting the Vote of the ‘Nones’) Chanting the psalms responsively, to take one liturgical action, is so unlike anything we’ll encounter during the week as to be immensely attractive — and meaningful. Why do we have to sing pop ditties in church that sound like the ones streaming into our ear pods all week long? While boomers and other left-oriented cohorts rush out the church doors, the ones that remain, especially the young people, are pushing the church rightward. With the flight of their elders, they find themselves wielding more influence in their churches, and their conservative views are gaining traction. Their cause is bolstered by an influx of young conservative priests coming out of seminary, priests who, according to a report, are far more likely than their older peers to identify as conservative both theologically and politically. On theology, the report said: “More than half of the priests who were ordained since 2010 see themselves on the conservative side of the scale. No surveyed priests who were ordained after 2020 described themselves as ‘very progressive.’” Although scattered around the country, and representing only a minority of Catholics, this resurgence of serious churchmanship is encouraging amid the general decline of Christianity in America. The post Shrinking Church, Thriving Church appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

In the years just before World War II, inspired by the meteoric rise of Nazi power, antisemitism peaked in America. Historian Jonathan Sarna reported there were more than 120 organizations dedicated to promoting anti-Jewish hatred and that, in 1938, a poll found that 20 percent of Americans were in favor of driving the Jews out of America.  Charles Coughlin, whose radio audience numbered in the tens of millions, defended the Kristallnacht pogroms against German Jews as being a proper defense against what he wildly claimed was the Jewish slaughter of millions of Germans. Fritz Kuhn led a rally of his Nazi-inspired German American Bund in Madison Square Garden, replete with stormtrooper uniforms, Nazi salutes, and more than 20,000 people in attendance. Even when Hitler had swallowed Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland, terror-bombing the civilians in its cities, Coughlin broadcast his plan to organize “an army of peace” to march on Washington to protest changing the neutrality laws —  a move that would have allowed America to aid European democracies that were soon to be scythed down by the Nazi blitzkrieg. He claimed Jews were trying to get America involved in a bloodbath. (READ MORE: Biden is Deaf to His ‘Better Angels’) America never got the chance to choose war with Hitler — Hitler declared war on us first, on Dec. 10, 1941, in solidarity with his Japanese allies. Then in January, at Wannsee, the Nazis finalized their plans for the methodical extermination of Europe’s Jews.  After three and a half years of bloody struggle, we and our allies destroyed the Nazi regime. General Eisenhower made sure that tens of thousands of American troops saw first-hand the horrors of the concentration camps with their piles of dead, unburied Jews and the skeletal survivors. Americans’ souls were seared by the utter obscenity of this and all racial hatred. Americans turned away from antisemitism and state-sponsored racial discrimination against black Americans, which had so stained their souls. This was memorable moral progress. My father grew up getting beaten up by schoolkids whose parents belonged to the German American Bund; I grew up in the ’60s when all that was a distant memory, my religious freedom was respected, and civil rights had been affirmed and enforced for all Americans. So many of us thought this was a permanent achievement. The sudden wave of antisemitism that exploded across America, exhilarated by Hamas’ orgy of murder, kidnapping, and rape has shown to a dismayed America that hate is back. It did not come from nowhere. It took a supremely skilled politician to turn around the national ethos and start to make America hate again. Americans Ignored Obama’s Ties to Antisemites When young Barack Obama was looking for his path in life, Pastor Jeremiah Wright played a major role in helping him get past the doper lifestyle. As the Guardian put it in 2008, “Wright officiated at Obama’s wedding and baptised his daughters, and was the Illinois senator’s spiritual guide for decades.” Obama even used a Wright phrase from a sermon, “the audacity of hope,” in his address to the DNC in 2004 and as the title of one of his books. That 2004 convention speech was brilliant. Obama seemed to be pointing the way toward a sane world in which America finally retired race as a leading issue in our country. Soaring language painted a picture of the America most of us dreamed of, an America united beyond hatred, fulfilling the promise of our Founders. In his first Inaugural Address, Obama seemed to understand our founding the way Abraham Lincoln had: The Fathers of this country fully expected slavery to die out as a government based on the principle of human equality established itself in the world. (READ MORE: Colleges Must Stop Admitting Foreign Students for Two Years) Obama painted himself as a uniter. Jews supported him in Illinois. But when word of Pastor Wright’s angry and racially charged rhetoric surfaced in the primary campaign of 2008, many began to doubt Obama’s real stance. It was not just that Wright called for God to damn America in one of his most infamous sermons. It was his intense anti-Israel stance and, worse, his association with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who was addicted to using vicious antisemitism as an emotional driver of his leadership. Wright publicly associated himself with Farrakhan, giving wider legitimacy to his Jew hatred in the eyes of Wright’s church and the larger black community. Now, a disciple of Wright was aspiring for the presidency, which would give unheard-of legitimacy to the Farrakhan brand of Jew hatred with which Wright had unabashedly associated himself. Obama got past this crisis not by admitting any wrong at all in his long association with the hateful Wright, or by admitting any wrong on his part. He did not ask for the forgiveness that Americans so easily give to those honest enough to admit their errors. Instead, he cast his preacher under his campaign bus and lectured Americans mildly about American racism. Because he was a good speaker, and because America wanted to have a historic figure in their midst (the figure Obama was sculpturing himself to be) – Americans dropped their suspicions.  As the title of a 2015 piece in the Atlantic put it, “Jeremiah Wright Is Still Angry at Barack Obama.” Obama showed far more loyalty to his own aspirations than to the man who mentored him and helped him forward. Hate is hateful towards its own. From Wright’s embrace of hatred as a motive force, Obama learned both a positive and a negative lesson. Positive: Hate moves people and can be used to great political advantage. Negative: When you use hate, you must disguise it much better than Jeremiah Wright did. You’ve got to introduce it by stealth. Hate Won Out During Obama’s Administration When Obama spoke to the nation in 2009 at his inauguration, he told Americans what he knew they wanted to hear. He spoke words with which almost all Americans agreed: “Because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself.” He endorsed, in broad terms, the fight against that terror that sought to impose itself on others in the Middle East and beyond. He seemed to liberal Democratic supporters of Israel such as Alan Dershowitz to be a true ally. (READ MORE: Protest Much? An Academic Reckoning Is Overdue.) But by the end of Obama’s eight years, the seemingly infinite promise of January 2009 was gone. Racial tensions were at a pitch not seen since the LA riots of the early ’90s. Instead of reconciliation, race had become a supreme category for the government and its allies in the universities and the media. It seemed to anyone not caught up in the sweeping change in the ethos wrought by the Obama crew that the only problem with American racism is that it had been that it had not been employed against the right group of people. To the horror of the older generation of Jewish liberal Democrats, a stealthy policy had emerged that, step by step, undermined the quarantine into which we had confined the terrorist mullahs of Iran. Obama took the lead in treating Israel’s prime minister with undisguised contempt, letting him into the White House only through the service entrance, like an English lord putting a tradesman in his place. He slowly but surely whittled away at the Israel alliance, bit by bit, until he enabled an understanding with Iran that guaranteed them — not forthrightly, but clearly enough — a nuclear bomb in another decade. As his last act as president, Obama directed that the U.S. allow the UN Security Council to pass a resolution proclaiming that Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, was an Islamic holy site to which Israel had no claim. In the wake of the exterminationist attack from Gaza on Oct. 7, those nurtured in the culture on which Obama has left this indelible mark showed the hate that seethes at its core. We could see for ourselves what all dealers in hate know: Hate is thrilling, motivating, and self-legitimating.  Obama’s more disciplined lesson of concealing hatred has not rubbed off. For that, we should be thankful. For the violent hatred suddenly on display seemingly everywhere in this country has shocked those who still have a grounding in the old America, before its ideals were used as mere plausible cover for this terrible, concealed agenda. The people see the late and half-hearted effort of the suddenly worried Biden crew to re-establish a non-threatening appearance. But Obama’s masterful ability to conceal hate is a rare talent. No one has that level of skill in the Biden bunch, who daily appear more and more empty of moral purpose or diplomatic skill. It may well be too late. Biden has been exposed as rudderless, unable to make even the most elementary moral distinction between the orgiastic butchers of Gaza and an organized and steadfast democratic ally who has maintained political freedom even in the face of 80 years of constant existential threat. (Just compare Israel to Ukraine, where elections and habeas corpus have been suspended to deal with its crisis.)  Without the Obama magic, hate stands exposed as just that — hate. Hate does not define America. Americans increasingly realize that it is up to them to make that clear. They will not shrink from the task. The post Make America Hate Again appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

There have always been idiots. I write this with a trace of nostalgia. Some of them have been illustrious, worthy of admiration. Throughout the centuries and cultures, they have played a central role in history. Sometimes they show you the path not to follow and, at other times, they drag behind them a multitude of unconditional supporters of stupidity. It is the imperfect drama of democracy. These people vote too and, following a sort of mindless tribalism, they tend to vote for other idiots. The expansive capacity of the idiot used to be limited in time. After all, as idiots, they do idiot things which nobody in their right mind pays too much attention to, apart from some who watch them with the same enthusiasm seen in zoo goers throwing peanuts at the monkeys or banging on the cage of a bored vulture in the vain hope that he will get angry, pull the keys out of his feathers, open the door and peck their eyes out. (READ MORE: Social Media After Florida and TikTok) Generally, those who follow an idiot do so out of fear that if they don’t, they may decide to act like an idiot towards those around them. Perhaps this explains how Maduro loyalists still exist. I know Nicolás thinks it is because of his beauty but I am sorry to bring the red-black vulture down from his perch: They only follow you out of fear of the Helicoide and of losing their official narco-benefits. Without Helicoide and the narco-state, Maduro would be raised alone in captivity, occasionally fed peanuts by those Central European tourists, so sensitive to the pains of the ozone layer and the hunger of animals. There is, however, a destabilizing factor in the traditional isolation of the common idiot and that is the globalization of idiocy. Networks do not filter. And the speed of our connections, so lame when downloading what is important, reaches ultrasonic heights when it comes to opening videos starring idiots. In its international expansion, among the recipients of the video, native idiots are immediately distinguishable because they jump, cell phone in hand, and give friendly elbows to coworkers while laughing their heads off. Then the monster’s ineptitude feeds on itself. Each like makes the idiot more of an idiot. It is a process that has no end, except when the idiot explodes into a thousand pieces on a live stream, thus reaping his greatest success, even if posthumous. If there are offspring, after the hangover of the post-mortem triumph, the field is fertilized for the emergence of new talents in the emerging industry of international stupidity. (READ MORE: Go Touch Some Grass) Since Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Carlos Alberto Montaner, and Álvaro Vargas Llosa signed the Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot some time ago and I do not believe that the treaty can be amended, I will not expand on the characteristics of these subjects but will limit my warning to their reproductive capacities. The contemporary idiot is passionate about virality. If viral comes with a challenge, the passion becomes devotion. The challenge can be to eat a live cat, to throw oneself into the void with no more protection than a coffee spoon clenched between the teeth, or to hit indiscriminately in the street anyone wearing blue. The only rule is to record it so no one can doubt the authorship. The feat is accompanied by tedious recordings of the idiot in question sitting in front of the computer, detailing the challenge and proving to the world that the idiocy contains a certain messianic aspect, a proselytizing vocation. However, idiots are no longer isolated as in the past. The views on their social networks make them minor national heroes — or even international heroes — in the making, and for themselves they are the living proof that idiocy, far from being a setback, is an honest reason to live. It is true that they die devoured by lions. Almost all great idiots die devoured by a lion, quite possibly during the filming of a viral video in which they tried to prove that the lion is an ideal pet for domestic coexistence. And that’s where their deed ends. However, their legacy remains. In the intermission between their idiocy and their tragic end, another legion of the same condition has arisen by their side; they also dream of going far, kissing fame, and dying devoured by a lion. (READ MORE: Gallup’s Stats on American Happiness Are Baloney) The drama of the globalization of idiots is not the unbearable lightness of their reason for living. After all, God did create us to be free. The drama is its prescriptive character and the copycat effect it has on its audience, which does nothing but activate hundreds of sleeper-idiots left, right, and center of our screens and that bothers me even more. Because up until recently, as a good columnist, I was convinced that in matters of idiots and idiocies, I had the exclusive. Today the competition is atrocious. And viral. The post The Globalization of Idiots appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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