Category Archives: Pols and Pundits

A Reader’s Tip

Posted on by

One reader suggests that the attacks against Christian apologist Dinesh D’Souza are part of the on-going psychological war on America’s ostensible ally in Asia, India.

I’ll follow up on that when I’ve had time to get into the whole story. D’Souza, from my perspective, isn’t an Indian public figure in the US I feel compelled to support, given that he’s spent his whole career telling American conservatives what they want to hear…or think they want to hear…misrepresenting many things about his country of origin in his eagerness to please his country of adoption.

But, in the end, what did it get him?

A hard-core of conservatives are also nativists and racialists and they would never accept a dark-skinned Indian man as one of them, no matter how thoughtfully he argued or how faithfully he defended their interests.

And D’Souza didn’t always argue thoughtfully, although almost always with insight.

He often took cheap shots at liberals and the left, for one thing, which discredited his other positions.

Hitting the left accurately where it hurts is fine, but tarring the many decent left-libertarians, anti-imperialists, and humanitarians, who for one reason or other call themselves leftists or liberals, is foolish and wrong.

Remember, the rule in American politics is that if you’re a conservative, you get handled worse if you also happen to be a minority.

It’s as though the media establishment sees people who go against their natural interests as some kind of traitor rather than just intellectually non-conformist.

 

“Conservative” Catholic Papers Fire Pope Critics

Posted on by

“First Things,” a conservative Catholic paper, has fired Maureen Mullarkey for criticizing Pope Francis, going to the extent of publicly ridiculing her conservative views.

Other supposedly conservative Catholic papers have also fired Pope Francis detractors:

Adam Shaw, a Fox news website editor, was fired from a Catholic News Service gig.

The National Catholic Register has fired Patrick Archbold, using liberal talking-points to make its case.

Why are all these “conservative” Catholics suddenly so eager to echo the Liberal party-line?

Were they ever real conservatives?

Are they under pressure from bigger bosses?

Are we only now finding out the extent of the subversion and infiltration of conservative Catholic circles at the behest of the ruling cabal?

As a non-Catholic, I can only feel intensely sorry for traditionalists of that faith.

And more than ever I am thankful that I have never  put all my faith “in princes nor in the son of man,” no, not even (or, maybe, especially) when they claim to speak infallibly.

Note:

I really do not have a major problem with the content of most of what Pope Francis has said publicly (from urging people to care about the poor, to supporting refugees, to asking us to care about the environment).

What I don’t like is the overwhelming priority he has given to these social issues over reaffirming the Church’s teachings on the family and on sexuality….a reaffirmation that is much more needed than the repetition of concerns voiced often enough by political groups.

Even Francis’ social teaching is marred by his ignorance of economic science and his partisanship on man-made global warming.

And all of his exhortations ring hollow when you realize how closely they follow the globalist agenda that is pushed by the intelligence agencies.

 

Howard Zinn: Card-Carrying Communist

Posted on by

The Other McCain:

One of the things you can learn from M. Stanton Evans’ recent book on Joe McCarthy’s investigations, Blacklisted by History, is how deeply the FBI had penetrated CPUSA. One reason that McCarthy’s was sometimes unable to publicly substantiate his accusations was that he relied on secret information passed along by the FBI. McCarthy couldn’t identity the source of his information without compromising the FBI’s investigations, so when his critics tried to make it appear that McCarthy’s suspicions were without merit, McCarthy couldn’t simply say, “Here is the FBI file.”

As we see from this file, the FBI had access to the CPUSA mailing list, which is not the same as a membership list, but is certainly strong evidence when combined — as in Zinn’s case — with admitted high-level involvement in a slew of front-group activities.

UPDATE III: Even if all the other FBI files proved nothing, this 1957 memorandum based on information from a former CPUSA member would seem rather conclusive:

So, according to the informant, Zinn appeared to have been a member of the Brooklyn section of CPUSA before the informant joined that section in 1949 — tending to corroborate information previously developed by the FBI.

Here is something very interesting: George Kirschner is named as co-author of Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States: The Wall Charts. Whether this is the same person as the George Kirshner who reportedly hosted CPUSA meetings in Brooklyn in 1952 might be a subject worth researching.

At any rate, the fact that “Informant T-1” was “brought up on charges of ‘white chauvinism’ by the CP” is also very interesting. This was the kind of “thought-crime” inquisition to which CPUSA members were sometimes subjected. Certainly an avid Communist like the informant, who had been a Party member since 1948, could not have been an outright racist, so we don’t know why he would have faced such an accusation. But it should be kept in mind that Stalin purged and executed many of the original Bolsheviks on fabricated pretexts of “deviationism,” and a similar Stalinist impulse might have made “T-1” a scapegoat.


This would seem to be the clincher: “T-1” is reported to have taken a photo of Zinn teaching a class on Communist doctrine in 1951, and to have provided the photo to the FBI in 1956. Zinn reportedly “took the position [in the 1951 class] that the basic teachings of Marx and Lenin were sound and should be adhered to.”

In May 1955, the FBI had de-activated its “Security Index” card on Zinn, who at that time was working on his Ph.D. at Columbia University and teaching at Upsala College in East Orange, N.J. Zinn’s file was re-opened by the FBI’s Atlanta office in 1957, after Zinn joined the faculty of Spellman College in Atlanta. A few years later, during the Kennedy administration, Zinn wrote an article in the Sunday edition of the Daily Worker disparaging Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and the FBI for their supposed failure to protect civil rights  — without ever acknowledging that Zinn himself had been interviewed a decade earlier by the FBI for his own Communist activities.

UPDATE IV: A little more Googling turns up George Kirschner’s December 2008 obituary in the New York Times, with commenters memorializing his association with Zinn:

KIRSCHNER–George. Beloved grandfather and greatgrandfather, father, husband, teacher and friend will be remembered for his contagious smile and energy, unwavering principles, profound sense of justice, unequivocal commitment to activism, and open and welcoming heart. Born in New York City, George served in the US Coast Guard during WWII. He began as a brewer, later went to college, and found his professional love as a teacher of history at the Walden School in New York City.

His age and biography as a longtime New Yorker would lend credence to the suspicion Kirschner was the same as the “Kirshner” listed in the FBI files as hosting Brooklyn CPUSA section meetings. So we may therefore presume that Kirschner is, like Zinn, now the only kind of good Communist.

UPDATE V: FBI files from the 1960s connect Zinn to a Who’s Who of the New Left anti-war radicalism:

In 1966, the main publication of the Socialist Workers Party, the Militant, reported Zinn joining with then-SDS president Carl Oglesby on a committee to defend a South African activist. After the SDS split in 1969 that led to the formation of the Weather Underground, Oglesby subsequently became a JFK assassination conspiracy theorist.

Zinn participated in a 1967 anti-war “teach-in” at Harvard, sponsored by SDS in cooperation with the American Institute for Marxist Studies, an organization founded by historian Herb Aptheker, chief theoretician of CPUSA.

At an MIT teach-in, Zinn was joined by Noam Chomsky.

In one of Zinn’s most infamous exploits, he traveled to Hanoi in 1968 with the radical priest Daniel Berrigan, an event hailed at press conference involving Tom Hayden (SDS co-founder and principal author of the “Port Huron Statement”) and socialist/pacifist Dave Dellinger, subsequently of “Chicago 7” notoriety.

What we see in all this, then, is how Zinn’s career forms a major thread in a rope that connects ’60s radicalism back to the Stalinism of the 1940s and ’50s. Zinn was a consistent advocate of Marxist-Leninist doctrine throughout his career, and it is amazing that his teachings — his anti-American history — are so popular nearly two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

America won the Cold War, but the Communists won the campuses.”

Did America win the Cold War? Or was that victory simply a propaganda coup?

 

And This Is How You Get To Contribute To The Weekly Standard

Posted on by

….you grovel to the right people.

P. J. O’Rourke, usually a funny guy, is distinctly unfunny, foul, and flatulent in this grotesque demonstration of ethnic self-flagellation masquerading as an explanation of why Ann Coulter committed pure evil by asking how many “effing” J’s there were anyway in the US .

Coulter was being no more incendiary than she usually is, only this time, the target was the ruling class, which sent out one of its lap-dogs to do its bidding.

 

 

 

Dorothy Day: Catholic Saint?

Posted on by

Pope Francis recently paid his respects to four “great Americans.”

They were Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King,  Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton.

I was disappointed but not surprised, as this pope seems to be very much in step with the spirit of the times, something one neither wants…nor expects…from the leader of a two thousand-year-old religious tradition that claims eternal validity.

The pope’s picks are all very political ones.

ARE there no “great Americans” among the millions who lead lives in the private sector, uninterested in politics?

Lincoln was a president; King was a political activist; Day was very political, indeed, a former communist; Merton was the conscience, so it is said, of the non-violent civil rights movement of the 1960s.

I find it disquieting that the Pope could not find at least one great contemplative or visionary or healer or scientist or businessman or scholar or artist outside the realm of politics, among the tens of thousands of Americans born since the inception of the republic.

People like

George Washington Carver,

Herman Melville,

Clara Barton

and Walt Disney.

I fell under the influence of Hegel and (for about 6 weeks) Marx when I was around 12. Then I went to a cartoon festival. The Russian cartoons, if they can be called that, were a revelation.

What kind of a system killed man’s sense of humor so thoroughly?

I was converted to “free markets” by  Tom & Jerry, Mickey Mouse, Beep-Beep, Sylvester & Tweetie bird.

At the very least, Pope Francis shows questionable judgment.

It is poor judgment for someone in such a profoundly influential position to pick political sides and make the Catholic church, which he represents, a partisan actor.

I read that Dorothy Day is being considered for canonization.

Perhaps she deserves it. I don’t know.

But there are some things that need to be considered first:

Day might have converted to Catholicism, but she openly admired the most blood-thirsty communists.

She praised Marx not merely as a theoretician, but as a human being. She considered the murderous Lenin admirable.

I don’t know how representative these statements are.

It’s something to think about though.

Given Pope Francis’ economic and political activism, it is a good guess that there is more to Dorothy Day than meets the eye.

 

 

 

Media Using Trump To Bash Evangelicals

Posted on by

While the media claims that evangelicals are a large part of Trump’s massive popularity, the statistics show otherwise.

The numbers show that Trump is actually much more popular with over-sixty unchurched voters, many of whom fall into the category of working-class.

That would explain why Trump’s distinctly secular and hedonistic attitudes have not put a dent in his support. Most of his supporters are not conservative/evangelical Christians at all.

They are disenfranchised older male working-class stiffs.

The Federalist.com:

Evangelical populists, the bloc once labeled the Religious Right, are frustrated by a GOP establishment that has frittered away this summer’s anti-Planned Parenthood moment. They are frustrated that party bigwigs spent much of the past few years calling for the party to “rebrand” and downplay social issues. They are frustrated by a Supreme Court that redefines marriage, lets Obamacare survive, and reigned by Justice Kennedy’s Humpty Dumpty jurisprudence. Evangelical populists are not just animated by social issues, but by generalized frustration with the ever-expanding, unconstitutional reach of big government. In Pew’s Political Typology, evangelical populists are “Steadfast Conservatives.”

 

Trumpian populists, in contrast, are frustrated by China “killing us in trade,” by hedge-fund managers who “pay no tax,” and, of course, by the bipartisan collusion of the Washington elite on immigration. In many ways, these sorts of complaints traditionally resonated with the white, working-class voters of the Democrat Party. Many of the same themes animate Bernie Sanders’ insurgent candidacy. Per Pew, Trumpian populists are “Hard-Pressed Skeptics.”

But while evangelical and Trumpian populism are distinct, there is obviously the potential for some overlap. For instance, despite Russell Moore’s efforts, I think a majority of evangelical populists are immigration hawks. Still, the overall thrust and tenor of these two groups differs widely.

 

So if evangelicals do not form the backbone of Trump’s support and are instead the religious subgroup least excited about him, how can we explain the media’s behavior over the past two weeks?

Many of these pundits are merely looking for any way to bash the evangelical piñata.

Some of it is the fault of our reliance on polls that don’t differentiate between evangelicals who go to church and “evangelicals” who never go to church. It’s a garbage in, garbage out process when pundits premise their analysis on fundamentally defective statistics. Public Policy Polling’s latest national poll found that 53 percent of GOP primary voters were evangelical Christians. That’s a pretty dramatic overstatement.

But I think there’s something more systematic going on. Many of these pundits are merely looking for any way to bash the evangelical piñata, and associating this disfavored demographic with the Donald’s degeneracy is simply too tempting to pass up.

For one journalist, supporting the twice-divorced Trump might prove the rank hypocrisy of evangelical voters. Frank Bruni’s column laid this charge on particularly thick:

If I want the admiration and blessings of the most flamboyant, judgmental Christians in America, I should marry three times, do a queasy-making amount of sexual boasting, verbally degrade women, talk trash about pretty much everyone else while I’m at it, encourage gamblers to hemorrhage their savings in casinos bearing my name and crow incessantly about how much money I’ve amassed?

Seems to work for Donald Trump… proving, yet again, how selective and incoherent the religiosity of many in the party’s God squad is.”

It’s all about bashing a(ny) religion that demands standards of behavior with which the thought-leaders of today no longer want to comply.

Rabbi Admits Shemitah Prophecy Was False

Posted on by

Yet another scam artist, Jonathan Cahn, bites the dust.

For all Christians, Jesus being Messiah, is the central key issue for the faith. This is also true for the Hebrew Roots Movement who use The Hebrew Calendar as the central foundation  for setting prophetic Jubilee and Sabbatical years (Shemitah). This became a major problem when Messianic Rabbi, Jonathan Cahn was confronted on one TV program, when one of his major promoters discovered that his date-setting predictions (of supposed coming calamities on America) ended up denying Jesus as the Messiah had him admit he based his book using calculations based on his own privately concocted new Hebrew Calendar, which never even existed.

Read the whole story of how Cahn’s Prophecy of a “Shemitah” judgment (7 year Biblical cycle of judgment on Israel) fell apart under a little serious questioning from another Hebrew Roots evangelist.

And yes, I know Shoebat never points out the Zionist hand in world affairs. Instead, as a converted Islamicist, he pushes the “Islamic Antichrist” line.

Oh dear.

Anti-Christs popping up everywhere…

 

The Return Of The Star Of Bethlehem ?

Posted on by

I missed this while I was away this summer:

CNN, July 1, 2015:

Tuesday night, Jupiter and Venus will culminate a month-long dance with what astronomers say will be a dazzling display, appearing just a fraction of a degree apart from one another in the night sky — a show that some astronomers say could account for the “Star of Bethlehem” mentioned in the Bible.

“To the eye they’ll look like a double star,” Sky & Telescope editor Kelly Beatty said on the magazine’s website.

To see the lineup, look to the west-northwest shortly after sunset.

This isn’t a particularly rare event; such conjunctions are fairly frequent, thanks to how Earth and the two planets line up in the solar system, according to Sky & Telescope.

iReporter Lonna Ours took these photos of Venus and Jupiter on June 21. The two planets are moving closer together throughout the month of June and will eventually appear to converge.

iReporter Lonna Ours took these photos of Venus and Jupiter on June 21. The two planets are moving closer together throughout the month of June and will eventually appear to converge.

But the combination of how close the planets will appear — one-third of a degree — the viewing angle at many latitudes and the time of day make this a particularly special event that ranks “very highly” among conjunctions, Rice University astronomer Patrick Hartigan wrote on his website.

Although the planets will appear to draw near one another in August and again in October, the next such event to rival Tuesday night’s won’t happen until 2023, he said.”

This report was plastered all over the Internet in July, along with the “Shemitah” judgment on America.

But pay attention to the “wiggle-room” words in the article: “some astronomers says could.….”

Pay attention also to the admission – tucked away deep in the article- that this phenomenon is not uncommon and not extraordinary at all.

That’s also true of the much-hyped “blood- moons,” that, along with the “Shemitah” cycle, is being used to scare American Christians into going along with the various New World Order charades being enacted on the national and international stage.

Even more tellingly, the real Star of Bethlehem that heralded the birth of Jesus, was not simply a Jupiter-Venus conjunction.

The Jupiter-Venus conjunction was only one of many powerful and unusual astrological events that took place in the time before and after  September 11, in 3 BC, when, by the preponderance of historical, astronomical, and prophetic evidence, Jesus was born.

[9/11 – ring a bell?]

Besides a conjunction of Jupiter and Venus, there were also multiple conjunctions of Jupiter (the planet of kings) with Regulus (the star associated with rulership) in the constellation of Leo (the sign associated with the House of Judah).  Every one of the planets were involved in some unusual event in the time around Christ’s birth.

The most revealing astrological evidence is actually already in the Biblical text, in the Book of Revelation.

Contrary to the belief of many Christians, Revelation is not solely a prophetic or forward-looking scripture.

It is a prophetic revelation.

Revelation indeed is the meaning of the word, apocalypse (which is the sub-title of the book).

And what is revealed is not only the future, but the past and the present as well.

In Revelation, the birth of Jesus is described in terms of the configuration of the stars (including the planets).

Here is the relevant passage, Rev. 12: 1:

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.”

At the time of the birth of Jesus in the month of September, the constellation of stars on the horizon would have been Virgo, a sign depicted as a young woman.

The sign of Virgo would have been the twelfth part of the zodiac in which the sun would have risen, hence the text says,  “a woman clothed with the sun.”

The woman also has the “moon under her feet” and a crown of twelve stars to give us a more accurate picture of the exact configuration in the sky at the time of Jesus’ birth.

The arguments back and forth about the exact time and date are too many to include here, but there are multiple “signs in the skies,” of overwhelming aesthetic and spiritual significance.

In contrast, the relatively common “Jupiter-Venus”  conjunction that took place at the end of June 2015 is very far from a return of the “Star of Bethlehem.”

 

 

Moral Melodrama Of Migrant Crisis

Posted on by

From the always insightful Brendan O’Neill at Spiked.com:

This media-orchestrated moral drama, complete with invasive photos of dead children, highly inappropriate comparisons with the Holocaust, and the performative piety of politicians and the Twitterati holding up pro-refugee placards or promising to open their homes to migrants, confirms that what ought to be a democratic discussion — the question of what caused this crisis and where refugees should go — has been reduced to an opportunity for virtue-advertising in which rational thought and public engagement are positively frowned upon.

The most striking thing about the outburst of ostentatious concern for the refugees is its bad faith. What is presented to us as a sad humanitarian disaster that somehow materialised over the past seven days is in fact traceable to the disintegration of the Middle East over the past five years and the hollowing-out of 50 years worth of state structures in Libya and the knock-on destabilising effect that had across north Africa — globe-shaking events which our governments in the West played no small part in bringing about. ……

Indeed, the value of the refugees seems to lie in the extent to which, through playing dutiful humanitarian victims, they might help Western politicians assume the role of smiling saviour and in the process repair their flagging moral authority. It’s well known that sections of the hard right have a tendency to dehumanise asylum seekers, treating the complex human beings who cross borders as an amorphous threat. Over the past week we have seen that the other side in this discussion, those who pose as friends of migrants, also play the dehumanisation game. Where the right criminalises migrants, liberals infantilise them, reducing them from moral agents who have made a decision to migrate to childlike victims in need of rescue by virtuous Westerners. The much-shared, wept-over photo of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi spoke to the new Western view of the migrant: as hapless, helpless; pathetic; children requiring our care. The hard right juxtaposes itself to the threatening migrant; the pseudo-humanitarian left presents itself as lifesaver to the childish migrant. Both sides dehumanise them, for self-serving reasons.”

European Migration Crisis: Some Facts

Posted on by

I will be blogging about the migration crisis in Europe, how it’s being spun, and to what end.

Bear with me.

There was enough to do with Merkel and Trump just this past week, and I barely touched the points I wanted to make.

But for a start, here are some numbers about migration that  you will never hear from the “Third-World Apocalypse” crowd, whether libertarians (Charles Burris) or paleo- conservative (Pat Buchanan).

They are all apparently acolytes of Malthus, Marx, and Paul Ehrlich (the notorious communist/green environmental scare-monger)  on this subject, for they conveniently omit from their NWO-funded propaganda the following facts:

WESTERN COUNTRIES SEE RELATIVELY FEW REFUGEES

Of the countries that receive the most refugees, no European or North American country even makes the top 10.

Western countries, even today, are seeing a small and manageable number of refugees. Countries experiencing refugee numbers large enough to strain their resources include Turkey, Lebanon and Pakistan;

Turkey has effectively built an entire large city of hundreds of thousands of people, complete with a school system and public utilities, populated entirely with Syrians.”

Source for numbers below is UN High Commission for Refugees:

Major refugee-hosting countries, end of 2014:
#1-5 (approx. numbers read from graph)

Turkey (1.6 million), Pakistan (1.5 m), Lebanon (1.18 m), Iran (1 m), Ethiopia (600k)

Major refugee-hosting countries, end of 2014:
#6-10

Jordan (650 k), Kenya (475 k), Chad (425 k), Uganda (400k) , China (300k).