Recently the Huffington Post published an interview with Malcom Brenner, who had sex with a dolphin. He defended his bestiality, saying: “And I’m hoping that in a more enlightened future, zoophilia will be no more regarded as controversial or harmful than interracial sex is today.”

For those who have watched the steady descent of the sexual revolution into an abyss of deviancy, there is not much that surprises. Many predicted the results of following the “If it feels good, do it” mantra of the 60s would mean open season on all Christian sexual mores. They have watched as the so-called freedom of sexual choice has become so absolute that even pedophilia is viewed with increasing acceptance.

But the most powerfully dangerous ideation of the sexual revolution has arisen in the form of transgenderism, which advocates freedom to choose gender, thus distorting, blurring, or even eradicating the distinction between male and female.

How did matters regarding sexuality come to such a pass in a country that once was, and in many ways still is, a deeply Christian nation?

The fact is that Christianity in America has been under relentless attack for decades by the left, which has routinely embraced and promoted the power of the State when it involves encouraging unrestrained human will, particularly in sexual matters. Radical leftists see in practicing Christians, whose mores are antithetical to the new barbarism, as an unwelcome restraint on an ideology that promotes the doctrines that choices of sexual expression and choices of gender are absolute rights.

The antagonism of the left toward Christians has reached such red-hot heat that because of the influence of the transgender movement, the State recently intervened to take a child away from her parents. According to the Washington Times, a Hamilton County, Ohio, judge took the teen “away from her parents because they refused to allow the 17-year-old to undergo hormone treatments as part of a female-to-male transition. The parents objected to the transition procedures because of their religious beliefs and refused to call their daughter by her chosen, male name, court records show.”

How are Christians reacting? Unfortunately, not with enough outrage.

Christians generally see attacks on their brethren in terms of one-off skirmishes — a parent or two here; a calligrapher there; a baker over there. By and large, Christians merely watch as individuals whose consciences won’t permit cooperation with radical paganism are sued and forced out of business; their jobs lost, their children taken away from them, their adoption and counseling services crushed because they are deemed as not “inclusive” enough or as promoting “hate;” their kids forced out of school because they won’t kiss the pagan’s ring by saying gender is a choice. Many Christians feel safe as long as they can attend church services that are not interrupted by SWAT teams breaking in to arrest congregants.

In sum, the broader outlines of the battle against Christians and Christian mores are often not clearly seen.

But as Hilaire Belloc presciently discerned decades ago, what he called the “New Paganism” is not confined to isolated attacks against individuals who happen to be Christian.

The attacks are directed toward Christianity itself. The left’s hope is to exterminate The Way altogether in order their pagan religion prevail throughout American society.

Belloc wrote: “The New Paganism is in process of building up a society of its own, wherein will be apparent two features novel in what used to be Christendom. Those two features have already appeared and will spread each in its own sphere, the one in the sphere of law — that is, of coercive enactment — the other in the sphere of status, that is, in the organization of society…In the first sphere, that of positive law, the New Paganism has already begun to produce and cannot but produce more and more a mass of restrictive legislation.”

The New Paganism utilizes the powers of the State, particularly the law and the courts, in order to change the foundations of a Christianized West and to promote paganism, even barbarism, as the basis of Western society. Barbarism then seeks to use the State to achieve an iron and tyrannous order, beginning with crushing dissenters like Christians, who believe they are to obey God rather than the State.

The first stages of the facilitation of the New Pagan society are achieved by a welter of restrictions against Christians. To promote unrestricted human will, particularly as regards sexual behavior and the self-definition promulgated by the transgender movement, inevitably means Christians who protest must be completely restrained by multifarious regulations and restrictions. Such restrictions include a push to exclude Christians from holding public office and increasingly deprive them of freedom of speech. Joy Behar’s attack against Vice President Mike Pence, in which she dismissed him as “mentally ill” because he prayed to Jesus and so was unfit for office is but one of many attacks. The broader implication is that all devout Christians are inherently unbalanced, irrational people and therefore should be denied office.

For the New Pagans, the inner voice that tells an “otherkin” he is actually a fox is absolutely rational. His choice to be another species is to be ratified by all of society. But Christians who believe the Ten Commandments are an expression of God’s higher laws are irrational and must be expunged from any meaningful role in society.

Persecution of Christians is nothing new, of course; though it has been relatively restrained in America until recent decades.

Instances of persecution abound, both past and present. During the reign of Louis XIV of France, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which had offered some protection of the Huguenot minority, meant Protestants were deprived of any rights whatever. The Sun King’s enforcer, Cardinal de Richelieu, succeeded in breaking any political power held by Huguenots by banning them from holding public office and by decreeing their children be taken from their homes to be instructed in the tenets of the Catholic faith, which was to be absolute.

In similar manner, America’s Christian parents, protestant and Catholic alike — most of whom do not have affordable and easily accessible alternatives — find their children forcibly instructed in the tenets of New Paganism in public schools. The doctrines of the New Paganism, including polytheistic multiculturalism, moral relativism, and political correctness exclude teaching of Christian principles.

Many of the victories against Christians have been achieved because Christians themselves have absorbed the left’s false interpretation of the First Amendment, which though guaranteeing religious freedom in its fullest sense, has been distorted by the left to mean that Christians have no place in the public square and that their rituals of faith must be confined within Church walls.

The result is that many Christians have accepted and even promoted the idea that Christians should not be involved in politics and indeed the broader culture. By and large, they have wound up accepting the persecutory policies directed against them, accepting being Christian only behind the closed doors of their churches, their homes, and their narrow church subcultures.

The lack of resistance has meant the New Paganism has succeeded in creating a network of stifling regulations affecting every area of Christian life. As Belloc put it, the regulatory onslaught means each department of life will be affected. Like Gulliver rendered unable to rise, Christians are increasingly hobbled by a legal “network that spread[s] and bind[s] those subject to it under a compulsion which cannot be escaped.”

Belloc pinpoints the problem as lying with “those moderns who will make of religion an individual thing [and no Catholic can evade the corporate quality of religion], telling us that its object being personal holiness and the salvation of the individual soul, it can have no concern with politics. On the contrary, the concern of religion with politics is inevitable.”

He adds that Christian doctrine always has broader implications for all of society. Difference in doctrine is at the root of all political and social differences; therefore, is the struggle for or against true doctrine the most vital of struggles.”

The New Paganism, which in its most current form of transgenderism is both anti-Christian and anti-science — and thus anti-Western — is deeply committed to the use of state power to quell opposition, Christian or otherwise, as has recently been shown in the case of a feminist British woman who was interrogated by police because her tweets questioning the castration of a sixteen-year-old boy were deemed prejudicial to transgenderism. All dissenters, not just Christians, should be appalled by such raw use of state power to suppress opposing views.

The New Paganism is bound to think America would be better if it were rid of Christians. Riddled with pre-science superstitions better belonging to pagan barbarism, the New Paganism is dead set against any restraints whatsoever. Christians, however, know human will is capable of great evil, particularly when it brooks no restraint. They know human will must be restrained by allegiance to a higher law than the state. They know the New Paganism is horribly regressive and inevitably oppressive, as are all ideologies that permit the absolute ascendency of human will, be it the will of an elite class or individuals. The ineluctable descent of the sexual revolution into bestiality, pedophilia and the mutilation of the human body in order to create a facsimile of the opposite sex are revelatory of a truly barbarous religion.

The Christian Church must respond vigorously or sink into paganism itself, as is already happening in some Main Line churches that are creating liturgies to bless bodily mutilation as spiritually transformative and as a way of attaining self-salvation. The Church must reject the new barbarism and its tyrannous assault on Christianity or find itself overwhelmed by the avid worshippers of the new gods. For when the God of Christianity is rejected, new and far, far worse gods arise to demand worship.

As Belloc himself concluded: “Men do not live long without gods; but when the gods of the New Paganism come they will not be merely insufficient, as were the gods of Greece, nor merely false; they will be evil. One might put it in a sentence, and say that the New Paganism, foolishly expecting satisfaction, will fall, before it knows where it is, into Satanism.”

Fay Voshell holds a M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, which awarded her its prize for excellence in systematic theology. Her thoughts have appeared in many online magazines, including American Thinker, National Review, CNN, Fox News and RealClearReligion. She may be reached at fvoshell@yahoo.com  

Would giving up our constitutional rights make our country more democratic?  Would regulating speech make government more accountable to the people?  Shockingly, some answer these questions with “yes.”

Figures ranging from Harvard academic Lawrence Lessig to former president Jimmy Carter have said America is no longer a democratic republic.  The latest entrant to this ritual is another Harvard professor, Yascha Mounk, who repeats these claims in the Atlantic.  These men push a similar formula for their grievances about our system: restrict political spending, then watch democracy flourish.  In reality, political spending is an essential expression of free speech that brings new voices into politics and makes our republic more vibrant. 

Mounk strangely attributes this “democratic deficit” to one main cause: corporations.  He recounts an alternative history whereby businesses lacked influence in politics for much of the 20th century – an assertion that may surprise those who know about the political battles over labor laws and health policy.  This all supposedly changed in the 1970s, when business increased its political footprint, leading to an influx of campaign spending.  (In fact, the 1970s is when federal regulation of campaign finance began to significantly increase.)

Besides being ahistorical, this line of thinking has dangerous implications that we’ve seen before.  Demonizing political spending justifies policies aimed at deterring the rich in theory but that actually burden ordinary citizens.  For every wealthy donor attacked on the floor of the U.S. Senate, there are many other average Americans harassed because the law requires that their political giving be put online.  For every program sending tax dollars to politicians to supposedly reduce the sway of big donors, there is an increased chance that corrupt candidates will find new ways to cheat the system.  Worse yet, efforts to deter political participation leave more power for abuse by government agencies – witness IRS abuses against Tea Party groups or pre-dawn police raids over alleged “coordination” between candidates and advocacy groups in Wisconsin.

Mounk calls for more campaign finance restrictions at several points without noting specifics.  (Indeed, apart from one widely criticized study, he does not cite empirical evidence for his claims about money in politics at all.)  But the policies he does mention suggest a draconian approach to cracking down on First Amendment rights.

He recalls favorably how states like Georgia and California literally criminalized the practice of lobbying – better known in the Constitution as “the freedom … to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”  He also advocates for overturning Citizens United – a case where the government tried to ban a movie that criticized then-senator Hillary Clinton when she was running for president, simply because it was made by a corporation.  Imagine paying a fine or facing jail time for daring to interact with other voters or elected officials in the “wrong” way or at the “wrong” time.

The call for more speech laws also contradicts Mounk’s own critiques.  He warns how federal agencies like the FCC and SEC have “supplanted” the job of lawmaking.  Yet the policies he mentions would only give more power to those agencies and others, like the FEC and the IRS.  That does not make America more democratic, but more bureaucratic.

What would make America more democratic would be enabling more political speech and participation.  The recent decline in campaign finance restrictions has coincided with the breakdown of traditional party elites.  The result is a rise in independent speech and more people running for office.  It is hard to argue in the era of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders that elites have tightened their grasp on our elections.

It’s true that Americans have an enduring skepticism of large, monopolistic institutions – both private and public.  If the goal is to decentralize power, the answer is surely not to allow opaque federal agencies to ban certain types of speech or enable politically motivated harassment of private citizens.  Engaging in public debate is how free speech should work in a democracy.  In a republic, that right cannot be taken away.

Joe Albanese is a research fellow at the Institute for Free Speech in Alexandria, Virginia.  The Institute is the nation’s largest organization dedicated to defending First Amendment political speech rights.

You want foreign collusion?  I’ve got foreign collusion for you.  On your phones, computers, tablets, and laptops.  In your bedroom, living room, and kitchen.

The Big Tech Industrial Complex has thousands of H-1B visa and green card employees.  Some of these workers’ roles are as engineers, analysts, and programmers, in the departments responsible for the regulation, suppression and censorship of political speech their parent companies have deemed hateful, inflammatory, and inappropriate for young audiences.

What this means is that foreigners who cannot vote in American elections have been given carte blanche by their bosses and executives to tyrannically muzzle political thought and opinions, which undoubtedly can, and likely does, influence the outcomes of American elections at all levels of government.

Here’s the tale of the tape of the top two Big Tech firms with federally approved H-1B and green card workers since 2014 (figures are from http://www.myvisajobs.com):

Twitter: 1,226

Google (including YouTube): 15,368

Though it is unclear exactly how many of the nearly 17,000 workers are directly responsible for the collusion, even a small percentage equals a lot of collusion.

Putin wishes he could collude like Big Tech

Vladimir Putin?  He ain’t got nothin’ on Big Tech.  And speaking of collusion, where are all the Democrats and Tessio Republicans obsessed with the “President Trump is Alger Hiss” conspiracy theory?

Big Tech fancies itself as God, as an omnipotent and omniscient Supreme Being.  The surreptitiousness by which, for example, Twitter operates is highly sophisticated.  Furthermore, the San Francisco-based social media company has always been cozy with Democrats and is notorious for denying right-leaning ads.

Ironically, news of the recent forced unfollowings of millions of users’ accounts was reported on Twitter.

Google is currently facing a lawsuit from conservative icon Dennis Prager, who alleges that YouTube restricted 30 videos from his PragerU channel due to their political themes and topics.  Some of the videos’ titles were “The most important question about abortion,” “Where are the moderate Muslims?,” and “Is Islam a religion of peace?”  Many of PragerU’s 4- to 5-minute vignette-presenters are well known conservative pundits, professors, and Pulitzer Prize-winners.

Twitter, likewise, is facing lawsuits from plaintiffs alleging that they were banned due to their views on race.

To make matters worse, the DMIC (Democrat Media Industrial Complex) is no longer masking its fetish for speech control.  (You thought guns were the only right the DMIC wants to control in its “all for me, none for thee” zeal?)  DMIC colluder and conspirator CNN recently embarked on a propaganda activist campaign against Infowars’ Alex Jones.  Whatever one’s opinion of Jones, it’s flat-out creepy how fervent the DMIC is on its anti-First Amendment warpath.

Have any of you ever, for a single second, heard DMIC networks, newspapers, and other organizations question the ethical appropriateness of foreign workers at American companies manipulating what political content their users see and don’t see, based on political ideology?

Me neither.

Online discrimination is worse than segregation

The internet is the greatest invention in mankind’s history.  I am a frequent Twitter and Google user; I have a YouTube video channel.  The Democrats told us the repeal of net neutrality was Armageddon (until tax reform came along – Democrats meant to say tax reform was Armageddon!).  Why, then, haven’t those same Democrats so in favor of net neutrality spoken a word about shadowbanning?

Our country, and our world, is fueled by technology.  Technology and the internet connect us in ways our elders never could have envisioned; one out of every three human beings on Earth communicates via the internet.  This is why I forewarn: continued, furtive, and unchecked discrimination against political viewpoints will make segregation and McCarthyism look like Camelot.  Segregationists and Joseph McCarthy operated openly; Big Tech, however, seems to relish the invisible influence it wields over its end users.

Democrats made a big deal about, and levied six figures in fines against, a baker who refused to make a cake for a same-sex couple, based on his religious beliefs.  But Democrats support Big Tech’s silencing of Republicans, conservatives, President Trump, and his supporters.  There are certainly legal arguments to be made that Big Tech is well within its rights to handpick what content appears on its platforms, but its obsession with trampling speech it arbitrarily labels as “hate speech” reeks of actual discrimination – the tech version of refusing service based on race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation.

Big Government, with all of its onerous regulations, always stifles economic growth, especially among small business.  But perhaps the time has come for the Federal Communications Commission to begin a serious examination of whether Big Tech has become too much like Orwell’s Animal Farm: “all views are equal, but some are more equal than others.”  Free speech is often beautiful and often ugly.  Freedom isn’t really about agreeing or disagreeing with speech; it’s about equally supporting the right to speech we deem agreeable or disagreeable.

The free market of ideas must be left as untouched as possible.  It’s true that no right is absolute, but mega-conglomerates weaponizing their services is frighteningly totalitarian.  If Fidel Castro, or Mao, or Pol Pot, or…fill in the dictator blank…had this kind of technology, he would have leveraged it exactly as Big Tech does today.

If foreign workers despotically meddling in our online political speech doesn’t keep us up at night, what will?  

Rich Logis is host of The Rich Logis Show, at TheRichLogisShow.com, and author of the upcoming book 10 Warning Signs Your Child is Becoming a Democrat.  He can be found on Twitter at @RichLogis.

Image: Patrick Nouhailler via Flickr.

Data available in both text and csv formats at the NASA, GISS website have been routinely cited as indicative of global warming despite their known weaknesses.  The three years 2015 through 2017 are widely reported as the three hottest years on record.

Tony Heller, however, has demonstrated that tampering with data from the U.S. Climatology Network (USHCN) has created the illusion of much higher temperatures in reported data than in the original data, for the continental United States.  This leads one to wonder how much not so widely known “adjustments” in GISS data have been responsible for similar results at a global level.

The GISS data are updated around the middle of each month, and I have compared the January and March versions in figure 1, for the years 1881 through 2017.  The data are smoothed over two years, in that, for example, the 1881 data point is the average of 1880 and 1881 and 2017 the average for 2016 and 2017.  This is commonly done to make data more presentable, allowing movements to be more clearly discerned and to smooth out the effects of “abnormal” years.

This comparison allows two interesting observations.  Firstly, the March revised data indicate somewhat higher temperatures in roughly the early third of the period, and somewhat lower temperatures the last third of the period.  The overall pattern, one of warming, however, remains…

  

…albeit slightly more muted than in the January version of the data, with 2015 through 2017 still being indicated as record hot years.  Importantly, the data points for 2016 and 2017 are much lower in the revised data, and the three years 2015 to 2017 show no acceleration in temperatures.

The second observation is that the 2017 data point (an average of 2016 and 2017 anomalies) is slightly lower than the 2016 point (an average of 2015 and 2016).  This implies that temperatures have fallen substantially during some months in 2017 below those of 2016, as if some sort of cycle may be taking place.  One can observe this from the monthly data in Figure 2, where temperatures peak in the first three months of 2016 before declining sharply in April and falling below those of 2015 from October through December.  Temperatures for the first eleven months of 2017 are below those of the corresponding months in 2016.  Importantly, the downward trend in temperatures continues into 2018, where January and February anomalies are both below December 2017, and those of the previous three years.

At least part of the cycle in the record temperature anomalies begun in late 2015 is related the “El Niño” effect and was recognized as making 2016 the “hottest” year on record, as early as July of that year, by Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).  El Niños typically occur every three to five years, with related temperature effects often lasting for many months.

Of course, any data set from only 1880, and inadequately covering the earth’s surface area, does not provide a definitive answer to the question of “global warming” in terms of geological time of thousands of years, and representing the entirety of the Earth.  But, as it has been the data set often referenced to substantiate global warming, one would have thought the substantially lower temperatures of the last many months would have merited highlighting in the mainstream media.

Is the selection of judges for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court based, in part, on their sex, race, or ethnicity?  The question arises from newly released texts sent between Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page.

Most attention to these texts is focused on their revelation of an apparent friendship between Strzok and United States Federal District Court judge Rudolph Contreras, who was appointed to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia by President Barack Obama in March of 2012.  Contreras has served on the FISC since May 19, 2016, with his term expiring on May 18, 2023.  Judges are selected for the FISC by the chief justice of the United States, who presently is John Roberts.  Strzok’s relationship with Contreras might have created a conflict of interest for Contreras regarding his presiding over General Michael Flynn’s guilty plea, as discussed by Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist and by Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller.

The Daily Caller quotes one of Strzok’s texts that apparently describes a conversation Strzok had with Contreras about his appointment to the FISC:

He mentioned thinking about it even though he was junior, they needed people and they especially needed minorities, and then he said he’d gotten on a month or two ago at a graduation party we were both at. 

This raises several questions.  Do the criteria for selecting FISC judges include sex, race, or ethnicity?  Does Contreras believe that the FISC “especially needed minorities,” or does Contreras believe that this is a belief held by those who select the FISC judges, or both?  If selection of FISC judges is based, in part, on sex, race, or ethnicity, how are such preferences consistent with laws that prohibit such preferences?

Somebody should have a discussion with Contreras and Roberts about these questions.  The media should try to find out about any such preferences.

Allan J. Favish is an attorney in Los Angeles.  His website is allanfavish.com.  James Fernald and Mr. Favish have co-authored a book about what might happen if the government ran Disneyland, entitled Fireworks! If the Government Ran the Fairest Kingdom of Them All (A Very Unauthorized Fantasy).

Many English-speaking people have little appreciation of what a wonderful gift their language is.  Partly because it incorporates so many other languages, and partly because of the rich traditions of Western culture, English is the most expressive, most useful, and most powerful language in the world.  We should treasure it.

That is why it irks me to see so many professional communicators misuse it.  The abusers in the news media are the people whose errors are most widely exposed to the public, but I have also seen written communications by professionals that cause me to cringe.

The final straw (for me) came when several instances of the misuse of the word “decimate” were aired on television.  The term has so commonly been misused that its colloquial definition has become closer to the word “devastate” than to its actual definition.  Decimation was a punitive practice of the ancient Roman army, in which every tenth man in the unit was put to death, and the execution was carried out by the other nine, which made “decimation” into a “devastating” experience, even for the survivors.

Many people today think decimation means a loss of ninety percent, not ten.

Another word commonly misused is “systemic,” which is often replaced with the related word “systematic.”  Systemic more appropriately refers to an embedded problem or defect than to a systematic solution to that problem.  A systemic property need not be a problem, but systematic problems should never exist.

Very commonly, the words “affect” and “effect” are improperly interchanged, as are “dual” and “duel.” 

Some words are commonly mispronounced – for example, “politization” instead of politicization and “undoubtably” instead of undoubtedly.

Perhaps the most irksome abuse of words is the use of the term “tragedy” when, in fact, the correct word is “atrocity.”  Tragedies tend to be accidental; atrocities are inflicted with deliberate and evil intent.

I am by no means immune to making linguistic errors myself, as my former teachers and editors will readily attest.  The purpose of this commentary is not to unduly criticize the honest mistakes of well meaning people, but rather to point to a need for all of us to take seriously the need to safeguard our language, not to consign that duty to “spell-check,” which often produces these errors.

I challenge each of you to review the following list and see whether you might be able to distinguish all of the following words from the others in the same line.

If you can’t, don’t be decimated.

Affect	Effect
Exacerbate	Exasperate
Access	Excess
Dual	Duel
Futile	Feudal
Politicization	Politization
Undoubtedly	Undoubtably
Capitol	Capital
Principle	Principal
Pled	Pleaded
Lead	Led
Medal	Metal	Mettle
Sight	Site	Cite
Where	Wear	Ware
There	Their	They’re
Fair	Fare
Who	Whom
Disperse	Disburse
Discriminate	Disseminate
Systematic	Systemic
Conscious	Conscience
Role	Roll
Untold	Untolled
Decimate	Devastate