1) “The West is facing an Islamic holy war. Governments and the public alike persist in a state of lethal timidity and denial, but they must start connecting the dots.” (Melanie Phillips, Jewish News Service)
From the article — What was most mind-blowing, she said, was the revelation from 1993 when the FBI wiretapped Hamas members in a Philadelphia hotel room and recorded them talking “about how to make their messaging more palatable to an American audience and how when they’re speaking to people on the left, they’re going to speak in terms of social justice and apartheid.” Which, of course, is precisely what’s been carried out to devastating effect. And these activists aren’t just aiming to destroy Israel and murder Jews. They’re aiming to destroy America.
2) “Trump, Vance Shake Europe Awake From Liberal Dream” (Rod Dreher, The European Conservative)
From the article — And this is the reality with which Donald Trump and JD Vance brutally smacked Europe. That is, European countries may stand with Ukraine in words, but absent American money, arms, and hard power, what do they have to offer? European armies are small and relatively weak. Since his first term, Trump has been urging European governments to spend more on their own defense. They have been reluctantly doing so, because it’s hard to find the money to spend on weapons when your economies are not doing well, and you have a welfare state to uphold. European social spending has for decades rested on the willingness of the United States to pay for Europe’s defense.
Eighty years after the end of the Second World War, and nearly forty years after the end of the Cold War, the American president has decided that enough is enough. It is time for Europe to grow up. But Europe faces a much worse problem…
3) “America Becoming Less Christian Is A Problem For Everyone. A massive new Pew survey with a misleading headline tells the tale of America’s ongoing de-Christianization.” (John Daniel Davidson, Federalist)
From the article — But one need not get lost in all this survey data to grasp the essential reality that the Pew study reveals: America is losing its Christian religion. Buried in Pew’s analysis is the critical observation that “it is inevitable that older generations will decline in size as their members gradually die. We also know that the younger cohorts succeeding them are much less religious.” That, in turn, means in order for the decline in Christianity to halt, “today’s young adults would have to become more religious as they age, or new generations of adults who are more religious than their parents would have to emerge.” Is that possible? Sure. Is it likely? Not unless something changes.
4) “How We Christians Squandered Our Influence Over Politics Throughout the West, and Why That’s a Disaster for Church and State” (John Zmirak, The Stream)
From the article — In the past, conservative parties would be expected to march along both tracks, to fend off foreign invasion and cultural subversion. Pro-life, pro-family policies were part and parcel of sane, conservative platforms in Europe, as they were in the U.S. right up through 2020. But first in Europe, and by 2024 in America, these movements began to splinter. Trump’s winning platform this year was heavily diluted, markedly less conservative on social issues than Mitt Romney’s was in 2012. (Not that Romney or the GOP really meant any of it, but they felt constrained to pretend.)
What happened and who’s at fault? Not the secular politicians, who follow public opinion rather than form it. The villain of this piece is in fact the Church and its leaders. (For this piece I’ll focus on my own Roman Catholic Church, but the lessons apply equally to leading Evangelical bodies, especially those thought leaders whom critics such as Megan Basham rightly call “regime Christians.”) Put bluntly, Church leaders eager to present themselves as “winsome” and eke out social acceptance from our elites have deliberately adopted political stances grounded in Utopianism, sentimentality, and misguided “compassion,” then pretended that these positions were “demanded by the Gospel.” This, even though for centuries most Christians and Church leaders believed and taught otherwise, and on many issues Scripture itself demands a sterner, more realistic stance.
5) “Jay Bhattacharya’s Confirmation Hearing Was an Embarrassment for Democrats. Senators who once denounced the NIH nominee’s ideas had nothing to say about pandemic lockdowns, mandates, or lessons learned.” (John Tierney, City Journal)
From the article — Bhattacharya, a Stanford professor of medicine and economics, had been a leading opponent of Covid measures supported by Democrats on the committee, including the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates for federal employees and for workers at private companies. One of the senators, Edward Markey of Massachusetts, had been so worried about the “dangerous” policies in Florida and other states that he advocated a national mask mandate in 2020 and introduced legislation to prod recalcitrant states. Last week, however, Markey and his Democratic colleagues studiously avoided discussing the mandates or any issue related to Covid. Pandemic? What pandemic?
Instead, they used their time to rail at Donald Trump and Elon Musk, leaving it to the committee’s Republicans to address the most consequential public-health edicts ever imposed on Americans. The Republican senators catalogued the costs of the lockdowns, the learning loss from school closures, and the ineffectiveness of the restrictions. They praised Bhattacharya for coauthoring the Great Barrington Declaration opposing lockdowns and school closures, and they thanked him for his court testimony opposing mask mandates for students. They criticized social media platforms’ censorship of his views and the smear campaign egged on by Anthony Fauci and the former NIH director, Francis Collins, who dismissed Bhattacharya and his coauthors as “fringe epidemiologists.”