Progressivism will hollow out your religion and wear its skin like a trophy

Progressivism will hollow out your religion and wear its skin like a trophy https://t.co/9SMWVtejO2

— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) June 2, 2023

Homelessness

Dennis Prager: "Explaining Jews, part V: Why are Jews liberal?"

Excerpts:

 2. More than any other major religion, Judaism has always been preoccupied with this world. The (secular) Encyclopedia Judaica begins its entry on ‘Afterlife’ by noting that ‘Judaism has always affirmed belief in an afterlife.’ But the preoccupation of Judaism has been making this world a better place. That is why the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) is largely silent about the afterlife; and it is preoccupied with rejecting ancient Egyptian values. That value system was centered on the afterlife — its bible was the Book of the Dead, and its greatest monuments, the pyramids, were tombs.

4. Liberal Jews fear most religion. ...

5. Despite their secularism, Jews may be the most religious ethnic group in the world. The problem is that their religion is rarely Judaism; rather it is every ‘ism’ of the Left. These include liberalism, socialism, feminism, Marxism and environmentalism. Jews involved in these movements believe in them with the same ideological fervor and same suspension of critical reason with which many religious people believe in their religion. It is therefore usually as hard to shake a liberal Jew’s belief in the Left and in the Democratic Party as it is to shake an evangelical Christian’s belief in Christianity. The big difference, however, is that the Christian believer acknowledges his Christianity is a belief, whereas the believer in liberalism views his belief as entirely the product of rational inquiry....

Politics Now Nation's Fastest Growing Religion

U.S.—A study released by Pew Research Center Thursday morning revealed a new fastest-growing religion in the country: politics.

Unlike many religions that only meet once or twice a week, adherents to the religion of politics worship every day, doing their devotionals in front of Fox News, CNN, or their carefully cultivated Twitter feeds. There is a major sectarian dispute among politics' followers, as to whether the one true god is a donkey or an elephant, but otherwise, their methods of practicing their faith are remarkably similar.

Political worshipers come in all forms, from casual believers who faithfully vote each election but don't regularly attend rallies or argue about politics online to crazed people who mail bombs to people they disagree with. But most political believers reject these violent zealots as radicalized extremists, insisting that politics is a "religion of peace."

Read the whole thing and subscribe to Babylon Bee.

The new rules

Sarah Hoyt: "The Left Believes in Trickle-Up Poverty"

How many decades now has the left been screaming about “trickle-down economics” and how the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats, or that giving tax breaks allows people to invest and thereby creates more jobs. is just “wrong, wrong, wrong, miles and miles of wrongitude?”

Thirty or so?

In fact, their mad infatuation with "democratic socialism" is part of this shrieking and this mindset. (Hello Occasio-Cortex Occasional Cortex.) And it's mind-bogglingly stupid as well as evil.

I didn't realize how much of both it is until a recent Facebook discussion in which a leftist got... vocal and defended trickle-up poverty.

Okay, they’re – probably, though I wouldn’t bet on all of them – not aware that this is their preferred pathway and end result. But it is.

The discussion was about charter schools funded by government, i.e., tax money.

The argument against them was the same it’s always been: it privileges a few kids, while the rest remain mired in failing government schools. I’d heard it a million times. I’d just never actually stepped back and taken a look at how ridiculous that is.

Look, there is no comment about the charters costing more (they usually don’t) and no argument about the fact that government schools are failing.

There is just this outraged screeching that not every kid can get the same thing. Which is kind of amazing when you think about it. Presented with a dysfunctional school system that has resisted every attempt at reform and that turns out increasingly worse-educated children every year, the outrage is not that we aren’t coming up with enough ways for children to escape it, but that one of the pathways for escape should be blocked because not every child can leave.

The same arguments are adduced against homeschooling (when the advocates of government scholastic prisons aren’t shrieking that homeschooled children are maladjusted and ignorant) because – and this is almost a verbatim quote from that Facebook discussion – a divorced mother of two who is making minimum wage can’t give them an appropriate education at home.

Uh? What?

So, what you’re saying is that if you can’t rescue everyone from, say, a house fire or the path of a hurricane, you should shoot those trying to escape so that everyone can die?

Thinking about it, I realized this is exactly how the left thinks about everything, even – or perhaps particularly – economics. ...

Or to put it another way, the left would rather we all starve in the dark than that someone light a stove and make some food.

What happened to California?

Has The Keith Ellison Domestic-Abuse Investigation Been Shut Down?

YES, next question.

The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, the Minnesota arm of the Democratic Party, concluded its investigation into domestic abuse allegations against Rep. Keith Ellison two weeks ago, Karen Monahan told The Daily Caller News Foundation on Sunday.

Monahan, a Sierra Club activist and Ellison’s ex-girlfriend, accused the Minnesota Democrat of emotionally and physically abusing her during their relationship.

“I only know the MNDFL did an investigation that ended two weeks ago,” Monahan wrote in a private Twitter message to TheDCNF on Sunday.

The Liberal Hive protects its own.

SATIRE: Feelings Don't Care About Your Facts

My fellow Americans: I feel like I need to say this.

A lot of you are angry. You're concerned about what's going on right now, and you're worried about the future. You're disgusted by the actions of your political opponents, and you feel hope and anticipation whenever there's the slightest possibility that their goals will be thwarted. You're filled with dread when they're winning, and you're lifted into paroxysms of joyous schadenfreude when they fail.

Good news: Those feelings are all you need! If there was ever a time in American history when it was worthwhile to pay attention to facts and evidence, those days are over. Thanks to the cutting-edge technology of the early 21st century, choosing to go with your gut has never been easier or more effective. Name the outrage, and you're just a click away from the corresponding mob.

Read the whole thing.

According to these two a-holes, it’s in the “rules for black people.”

Bruce Bawer of PJ Media: "Death by Entitlement"

The setup:

On August 7, the New York Times ran a story by Rukmini Callimachi about Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, a young American couple, both graduates of Georgetown University, who decided to quit their humdrum office jobs and go on an epic bike ride and camping trip that would take them all over the world.

And the pitch...

So in July of last year, they flew from Washington, D.C., to Cape Town, and from there bicycled through South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, and Malawi to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. From there, they flew to Cairo, and after seeing the pyramids flew on to Casablanca, from which they cycled through Morocco, Spain, France, Monaco, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Greece, to Turkey. From there, another flight took them to Kazakhstan. They biked through Kyrgyzstan and entered Tajikistan. It was in that country that their journey came to an abrupt end this past July 29, when five ISIS members deliberately plowed their car into the two adventurers, killing them along with two temporary cycling companions, one from Switzerland and the other from the Netherlands. “Two days later,” wrote Callimachi, “the Islamic State released a video showing five men it identified as the attackers, sitting before the ISIS flag. They face the camera and make a vow: to kill 'disbelievers.'”

The NYTimes called them heroes. They were not; they were deluded about the world and now they're dead.

The conclusion:

Times readers called the couple heroes. No, the heroes are not these poor fools who stumbled into an ISIS-controlled area; the heroes are the soldiers from the U.S. and elsewhere – most of them a decade or so younger, and centuries savvier, than Austin and Geoghegan – who, while the two 29-year-olds were on a year-long cycling holiday, were risking their lives to beat back ISIS. What, then, is the moral of this couple's story? In the last analysis, it's a story about two young people who, like many other privileged members of their generation of Americans, went to a supposedly top-notch university only to come away poorly educated but heavily propagandized – imbued with a fashionable postmodern contempt for Western civilization and a readiness to idealize and sentimentalize “the other” (especially when the latter is decidedly uncivilized). This, ultimately, was their tragedy: taking for granted American freedom, prosperity, and security, they dismissed these extraordinary blessings as boring, banal, and (in Austin's word) “beige,” and set off, with the starry-eyed and suicidal naivete of children who never entirely grew up, on a child's fairy-tale adventure into the most perilous parts of the planet. Far from being inspirational, theirs is a profoundly cautionary – and distinctly timely – tale that every American, parents especially, should take to heart.

But they are more than fools, they are victims of a culture and educational system that lies to them about reality. It tells them fables that made them believe that the world is just a larger Disney Land. That an enemy is just a friend you have not persuaded yet.

Walk Away: Leftists Abuse St. Jude Family Who Thanked Eric Trump For Raising Millions of Dollars to Help Children With Cancer

The Left Is Slipping into Terminal Irrelevance

Roger Kimball

There are no liberals on the Left these days, only aspiring totalitarians. The jarring discrepancy between their moral pretensions, on the one hand, and their brutal pronunciamentos and actions, on the other, is yet another reason that their crusade for intolerance is likely to redound against them like an inept soccer player who scores an “own goal” against his own team.

Donald Trump has instituted no gulags, he has started no wars, he is presiding over a bustling economy and an increasingly confident populace. He is normal. Maxine Waters and her ilk, on the contrary, loudly call for incivility, intolerance, disruption, and even violence. They, and their pathetic media enablers, are the outliers, screeching piteously on the margins of life.

Read the whole thing.

I can't wait for corporate media to tell Christians which Bible passages they're allowed to quote

First they weaponized the FBI, now they're weaponizing God's word.

Prof. Bret Weinstein: ‘What I Have Seen Functions…Like A Cult’

Liberalism is a mental; disease.

The Long March: Reckoning With 1968's 'Cultural Revolution,' 50 Years On

Long, but a good read.  The Right lost the culture war and what we have is the result.

“It’s Different When We Do It”

As spotted by Jim Hoft, two Gray Ladies in one!

The news that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s motorcade was pelted with shoes and tomatoes by Egyptian protesters, who also taunted her by chanting “Monica! Monica!” as she left the U.S. consulate in Alexandria on Sunday, delighted conservative bloggers in the United States.

-- The New York Times, yesterday.

A day after an Iraqi television journalist threw his shoes at President Bush at a news conference in Baghdad on Sunday, his act of defiance toward the American commander-in-chief reverberated throughout Iraq and across the Arab world.
(snip)

In Syria, he was hailed as a hero. In Libya, he was given an award for courage.

Across much of the Arab world on Monday, the shoe-throwing incident generated front page headlines and continuing television news coverage. A thinly veiled glee could be discerned in much of the reporting…

-- The New York Times, December 16, 2008.

Why Did It Take Two Weeks To Discover Parkland Students’ Astroturfing?

Because the story's too good the way it's being told.

The response was professionalized. That’s not surprising, because this is what organization that gets results actually looks like. It’s not a bunch of magical kids in somebody’s living room....

On Twitter, I lost track of the number of bluechecks rhapsodizing over how effective the kids’ organizational instincts were. But organizing isn’t instinctive. It’s skilled work; you have to learn how to do it, and it takes really a lot of people. You don’t just get a few magical kids who’re amazing and naturally good at it.

The real tip-off should have been the $500,000 donations from Winfrey and Clooney. Big celebrities don’t give huge money to strangers on a whim. Somebody who knows Winfrey and Clooney called them and asked. But the press’s response was to be ever more impressed with the kids.

Read the whole thing.  The Left is organized for this sort of thing.  The Right doesn't have a clue.

Movie Critics Complain Eastwood Doesn't Show Sympathetic Terrorist

TruthRevolt friend Christian Toto over at HollywoodInToto.com has helpfully rounded up a sample of movie reviews of openly conservative director Clint Eastwood's new terrorism drama The 15:17 to Paris. The film is based on the true-life Islamist attack on a Paris-bound train in 2015 that was quickly thwarted by three American heroes who happened to be passengers on that train.

And:


 "A few critics hated how Eastwood didn’t give enough screen time to the terrorist in question, Ayoub El-Khazzani," wrote Toto, such as this reviewer from The National Post:

15:17 to Paris overly simplifies the attack and its aftermath. The terrorist (Ray Corasani) snarls and wears sneakers, but there’s little more to him.

The movie's not about him. The movie is about the three American heroes. And to the outrage of leftist reviewers, Eastwood apparently wasn't inclined to depict a sympathetic terrorist. This is a Clint Eastwood movie, not a Rolling Stone magazine cover.

In their mating and migratory habits, liberals are indistinguishable from members of the Ku Klux Klan

Jared Taylor Remembers Joe Sobran