A New Hope

 

I said some time ago that the only hope for America, and for the West, was a religious revival. It was for God to step in.

I think he’s doing it.

Apparently, according to recent polling, the proportion of Christians is growing again in the US, and the proportion of atheists declining. This reverses a trend since the 1960s. 

We are seeing celebrity after celebrity publicly convert: Candace Owens, Joe Rogan (partly), Jordan Peterson, Stuart Brand, Ayan Hirsi Ali. 

I think this is largely a reaction to Islamism. People are coming to realize that the values of liberal democracy and human rights have a specifically Christian foundation, and that secular humanism has no response to Islamism. Christianity is the only adequate response.

It is also a reaction to the New Atheism. Inadvertently, Dawkins and the horsemen reintroduced the arguments for the excistence of God by reviving the argument explicitly. Making more people aware that the arguments for God’s existence are philosophically stronger than the case for atheism. We have seen a renaissance in Christian apologetics.

At the same time, the msterialist attempt to discredit religion and replace it with the great god Science is collapsing. Darwinian evolution seems no longer tenable; it was with Darwin that the notion began that religion and science were opposed. Physics now argues for a beginning to the universe and a design. Life could not have happened by chance. The social sciences, most directly invented as a replacement for religion,  are being discredited, partly by the scandal of unreproducible results, partly because of the growing problems of addiction and mental illness since we handed our souls over to this approach, partly because they are so obviously at variance now with common sense and the physical senses as, for example, to endorse transgenderism. The collapse of the Covid coverups adds further momentum to the retreat from the scientistic idol.

Also at the same time, it is increasingly evident, I think, to the conscience of the average man and woman, that the world is dividing into camps of good and evil; and religion is on the side of good, irreligion evil. That polarization is shown recently by the swing of honest leftists like Joe Rogan, Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, Jimmy Dore, and RFK Jr. over to the right, where they find themselves hobnobbing with the religious.

That this all seems to be happening at once suggests the hand of the divine. Even before noticing that new and powerful evidence is coming out that the Shroud of Turin is authentic, and that its authenticity was deliberately suppressed by the secularists back in the 1980s. And eucharistic miracles are popping up all over, and uncorrupt corpses. 

Not to mention Trump’s miraculous survival of an assassination attempt, eerily reminiscent of one Washington survived at the nation’s founding.

The change has come.

The Harris Bump

 

The latest theme among commentators is how Kamala Harris is now winning the US Presidential election. Right-wing commentators are alarmed, and are saying the Trump campaign is on the back foot.

I think this is largely driven by the need to have something new to talk about. And this is just the inevitable bump of excitement any candidate gets when they are nominated. 

I expect the next story to be how the Harris campaign is crashing and burning. That should hit by election day.

People are not focused on Harris and Walz yet. There is so much material there for opp research and memes. And the Trump campaign has lots of money to put it out.

Trump is relatively restrained so far at attacking Harris. His tack is just that she is too radically left-wing. I think he is right. Because she is a woman and of darker skin tone, the minute he says anything mocking, as he does so well, he will be declared a racist, a sexist, and a bully. It is best to hold back and let her destroy herself. And let the independent commentators and meme makers do the rest.

I think she will manage to do it.

Famous Last Words

 

Family Politics

 

Older readers may get the reference,.

An old saying has it that a happy family is the responsibility of the wife. There is perhaps wisdom in this. We know, that in North America, for example, women are far more likely than men to initiate a divorce. 

This also seems to be the wisdom of the ages as reflected in myth. It is Eve, after all, who upsets the happy family situation in Eden. It is Delilah. It is Pandora in Greek myth who opens the box. Or Psyche who turns on the light. 

This is also the common wisdom of fairy tales. The problem usually comes with the introduction to the family of a wicked mother, or stepmother—not a father or stepfather. Rapunzel, Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel.

Women intrinsically have greater power in the family, because they are the ones in control of the premises: they are, in the traditional arrangement, always there. The father and husband is more in the role of a guest. They are also in more constant and intimate contact with the children. The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. If they want to use this power, they can easily alienate the children from their partner.

It is also, broadly, feminism, the women’s movement, that is responsible for the current collapse of the North American family.

It follows, if there is a dysfunctional family, “cherchez la femme.” Most often it is because a mother plays favourites. Granted, there are cases of abusive husbands. But logic and the wisdom of the ages suggests that it is more often the wife and mother, even if this is covert, behind the scenes. Every Narcissus needs his Echo. Men are like dogs. They tend naturally to adore women and seek to make them happy.

Why "Globalist" Governments Seem to be Acting Strangely

 

Aristotle notes that tyrannies establish themselves when a government suppresses all centres of power or authority in a society other than itself. This allows the ruler to dictate without opposition.

Aside from governments that directly suppress opposition movements, we should, therefore, beware a government that is opposed to private enterprise or the wealthy. We should fear a government that is unfriendly to organized religion. We should beware a government that seems to be deliberately impoverishing its own people, for this gives them less time or resources to form opposition movements.  We should fear governments bringing in large groups of foreigners. That reduces democratic controls and controls of social traditions and conventions on their actions. We should indeed fear any government hostile to local cultural traditions and conventions—these are checks on their power. We should suspect any government that begins to tinker with elections. We should beware a federal government that seeks to reduce or the powers of local authorities within a federation. We should beware a government that seems to want to control or suppress independent media.

And there you have the Trudeau Liberal platform; and that of the modern left generally.

Be aware; be afraid.

Not With a Whimper but a Bang

 

The stock markets are crashing today. People are talking major recession. To follow Covid lockdowns, rampant inflation, and war in Europe. 

If they are right, this should be the final nail in the coffins of Kamala Harris and the Democrats in the US, and Justin Trudeau in Canada. They were set to lose anyway, but this could be historic, like RB Bennet or Herbert Hoover in their day. The left might be discredited for a generation. It may also be lucky for Farage in the UK and LePen in France that they were snookered, in part by political machinations, in the recent elections: that leaves the left holding this bag.

Meantime, in his most recent column, written before today’s news from the world’s stock markets, Xerxes the leftist columnist already comes out hard against “the system.” He quotes left-wing Anglo-Irish blogger Paul Kingsnorth: “We like to believe that we live in independent nation states run by leaders of our choosing, but this is a mirage designed to disguise the reality: The Machine is a giant, global, digitized web of commercial power and control, managed by transnational corporations and gatherings of elite powerbrokers, none of whom have very much interest in what ‘the people’ think.”

Strikingly, this is exactly what the right is saying. This is just what Trump and Farage and Poilievre have been saying. To be fair, it is not just the left that has shifted. A few years ago, the right would have resisted blaming transnational corporations. Not any more. Both left and right are now alarmed at elite powerbrokers and the trend to globalization. 

Of course, in the recent past, as soon as some leftist raises this alarm, he is declared by the left to be “far right”—see RFK, Jimmy Dore, Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan. But even if this continues, if the shadowy elites sustain their control over the Democratic Party or the Liberals and NDP, the end result will be the same. The people are uniting against the powers that be.

Kingsworth and Xerxes think the problem is that things are getting more complicated due to technology, so that there is a greater distance between the elites and the common people. I think the exact opposite is happening: the new technology is levelling things, removing the need for an elite, and all its advantages. And making it easier for he people to seize control.