The Unmasking of The Weekly Standard

By Julie Kelly
https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/31/the-unmasking-of-the-weekly-standard/
July 31, 2018

Barack Obama really owes Bill Kristol—big time.

First, had Kristol and his fellow neoconservatives not pushed for a deadly, prolonged war in Iraq after September 11, there would be no President Obama. The first-term senator’s premature candidacy for president was based largely on his vocal opposition to the Iraq War, which had been supported by his primary opponent, Senator Hillary Clinton.

“Most of you know I opposed this war from the start,” Obama said in his announcement speech in February 2007. “America, it’s time to start bringing our troops home. It’s time to admit that no amount of American lives can resolve the political disagreement that lies at the heart of someone else’s civil war.”

Second, Kristol’s magazine, The Weekly Standard, just gave political cover to Obama’s most unforgivable scandal: The weaponization of our law enforcement and intelligence apparatus to target Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and violate the constitutional rights of private U.S. citizens.

In a flawed, dishonest, and truly contemptible cover article by April Doss, The Weekly Standard crossed the line from Trump foe to Obama defender; in the process, the allegedly “conservative” publication gave voice to a hyperpartisan Democrat who briefly worked for a disgraced Senate committee so she could smear a man who has been a real hero these past 18 months: House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).

The article, “What We Can Learn About Carter Page, the FBI, and Devin Nunes’ Conspiracy Theory,” reflects the kind of willful ignorance and deceitfulness employed by pundits on the Left and the NeverTrump Right to make Nunes—and not the dozens of unelected bureaucrats who orchestrated this travesty—the real villain. It is straight-up, Adam Schiff-style propaganda.

Unreasonable and Belligerent

Ever since the Justice Department on July 21 released a heavily redacted version of the application (along with three renewals) submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in October 2016 seeking authority to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page, the anti-Trump media mob has focused its wrath on Nunes, whose committee authored the bombshell memo that first outlined the misconduct behind the FISA application. Kristol and the Standard have aided #TheResistance in attacking Nunes since his memo was issued last February. Kristol objected to the memo’s release, then ridiculously warned that “when the history of the degradation of the Republican Party is written, the Nunes memo will be a significant moment.”

A July 24 article by Haley Byrd—who has written nothing about the Carter Page FISA warrant—defended the Justice Department’s FISA application and criticized Rep. James Jordan (R-Ohio) for “carrying water for the Nunes memo.” Byrd erroneously insists the memo “made a number of claims that either misrepresented information contained in the application or were called into question by the material,” notably, Nunes’s finding that the government did not notify the FISA court that the Steele dossier had been funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.

This was also the crux of April Doss’s cover story. For a short time in 2017, Doss worked as the minority counsel (read: Democrat) for the Senate Intelligence Committee. During that time, she interrogated Carter Page, who said in a tweet over the weekend that Doss behaved “unreasonably and belligerently” during his interview and that “her latest senseless assault based on no fact whatsoever would come as no surprise.” She also caught flack for asking whether a potential witness to the committee knew anyone “of Russian nationality or descent.”  (A few weeks after the 2016 presidential election, Doss said recounts were needed in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.)

In her nearly 4,000-word screed for the Standard, Doss brags about her national security background and testifies to the airtight integrity of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. She uses the thinnest tissue of evidence to justify the government spying on Page based on his “potentially sketchy ties to Russia,” including the fact he lived in Russia more than ten years ago and his July 2016 speech in Moscow.

She then unleashed a vicious attack against Nunes, accusing him of making “wild accusations” and fueling a “crazy conspiracy narrative” about how the FBI abused the FISA process by using unverified political opposition research to gain authorization to spy on a rival presidential campaign without disclosing the funding source of the research.

“It’s an exhausting theory to contemplate,” Doss wrote, “and yet one that many people, fueled by conspiracy-mongering rumors on the Internet about the workings of the ‘deep state,’ believed. What the newly released documents show is that the theory is utterly bunk.”

Well-Documented for “Bunk”

Now, let’s set aside for a moment that it is not even close to bunk or a conspiracy theory. Every bit of it is true. But to make her case, Doss needs to twist the facts, omit key details and smear the messenger. She uses the same evidence twice, much like the FISA application itself, but disguises it as separate material: “According to the FBI application and the now-infamous Steele dossier, Page met with high-ranking Russian government officials.” The FBI application relied on the Steele dossier for the claim Page met with high-ranking officials. (An accusation Page denies.) It is the same source.

Doss claimed Nunes recused himself from the investigation when he was the subject of a politically motivated ethics probe. Nunes did not recuse himself; he said he would ask another congressman to “temporarily take charge of the Committee’s Russia investigation” until the ethics inquiry concluded. There is a big difference between this and a recusal; something a self-righteous lawyer like Doss presumably should understand.

Not once does Doss mention the 253-page report issued by Nunes’ committee in April that documents the “conspiracy” she mocks. The activities of the “deep state” and their accomplices in the media are laid out in detail. But of course “Nunes memo!” is chum for the Left.

Spinning, Spinning, Spinning

Incredibly, Doss then argued that a small footnote in the application about the dossier’s “bias” refutes Nunes’s most explosive claim that the FBI concealed from the FISC the dossier’s political funding: “The FBI did indeed tell the FISC about this potential bias in lengthy footnotes in all four applications that explained that a U.S. law firm (now known to be Perkins Coie) had hired a U.S. person (who we now know is Glenn Simpson) “to conduct research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia.” Per the footnote, that U.S. person then hired “Source #1” (Steele.)”

Get it? So, according to Doss, that intentionally vague and misleading footnote proves that the FBI really did tell federal judges that the DNC and Clinton campaign paid for the Steele dossier. Even though any half-literate person could see that is not the case.

Next comes what could be the most jaw-dropping claim in the entire article: “Not all of Congress is dysfunctional, and the Senate Intelligence Committee is functioning in a far more robust, bipartisan way than anything we’ve seen in the House during this Congress.” This is the same committee whose security chief—the man in charge of protecting all its classified material—was arrested in June and charged with three counts of lying to the FBI. The indictment of James Wolfe revealed that not only was he illegally leaking classified information from the committee to the media, he was having a lengthy affair with a journalist thirty-plus years his junior.

Robust and bipartisan, you say?

It is one thing for the Standard to give marquis space to a sloppily written, politically motivated rant against a Republican congressman. It is quite another to fall into the abyss with vindictive Democrats who are hellbent on destroying the Trump presidency and taking the Republican Party down with it. The Doss article is the latest proof of how far this once-serious publication has fallen; how much it has abandoned any legitimate ties to the Right; and how its founder and reporters are now protecting left-wing loyalists of a corrupt administration that spent eight years doing everything in its power to undermine the conservative movement and vilify conservatives.

Obama must be smiling. Bigly.

Freedom for Tommy Robinson

BY BRUCE BAWER

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/freedom-for-tommy-robinson/

August 1, 2018

Ever since Tommy Robinson was summarily arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned on May 25 – for the supposed offense of having live-streamed a Facebook report from outside a courthouse in Leeds where members of a Muslim rape gang were on trial – the British left and its allies abroad have been arguing that justice was done. And it's not just the left that has defended this sham. As I noted on June 5, three of Britain's most prominent conservative critics of Islam joined in the pile-on: columnist James Delingpole, UKIP founder Nigel Farage (who pronounced that “the judge had almost no choice but to give him a jail sentence”), and Tory MEP Daniel Hannan (who affirmed that “Tommy Robinson belongs in prison”).

In my June 5 piece, I failed to notice a fourth conservative who cheered Robinson's imprisonment. In a May 30 blog entry, Londonistan author Melanie Phillips declared that not just Robinson's supporters “but a number of well-known commentators and other public figures in America, Britain and elsewhere now look very silly as a result of their unfamiliarity with English legal procedure....Unfortunately, the rules safeguarding a fair trial in Britain are simply not understood at all in the US, where such restrictions on what can be said during criminal proceedings are totally unknown and the right to free speech under the First Amendment carries all before it.”

Phillips wasn't finished with the topic. On July 17, she took to the pages of the London Times with an ardent piece defending Tommy's quick-as-a-blink transformation from free man to convict. “It’s said that the length of his sentence was wholly disproportionate,” she wrote. “Given the seriousness of his repeated offence, it was in fact wholly unremarkable.” Again, she singled out Americans: “People in the US and elsewhere simply refuse to acknowledge that Britain has stringent rules prohibiting things being said or done which may prejudice a fair trial. They dismiss this as irrelevant and evidence of British absurdity. They say they know that injustice has been done here. Their ignorance is exceeded only by their arrogance.”

Ignorance and arrogance! Well, it will be interesting to see what Phillips and the other champions of the wisdom of the Leeds Crown Court have to say now. On Wednesday, in London, Lord Burnett, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, and two other judges issued a remarkable ruling in which they totally trashed the actions of the Leeds court. Some excerpts from the official summary of the judgment: “court agrees that the judge should not have commenced the hearing of contempt proceedings that day. Once the appellant had removed the video from Facebook, there was no longer sufficient urgency to justify immediate proceedings.” Moreover, “[t]here was a muddle over the nature of the contempt being considered....There was no clarity about what the appellant was admitting or on what basis he was being sentenced.”

That wasn't all: “The order at Leeds Crown Court was also erroneously drawn up to suggest the appellant had been convicted of a criminal offence rather than having been committed for contempt of court. Errors like this have serious consequences upon the classification of prisoners, resulting in the deprivation of privileges and release on licence. In this case, it also resulted in the erroneous imposition of a victim surcharge.” The conclusion is blunt: “The finding of contempt in Leeds is quashed. All consequential orders fall away. The court remits the matter of alleged contempt at Leeds Crown Court to be heard again before a different judge.” Bottom line: Robinson was freed on bail pending a new, properly conducted hearing.

“[N]o longer sufficient urgency.” “[A] muddle.” “[N]o clarity.” “[E]rroneously drawn up.” Strong words, reaffirming ancient English principles of justice and fairness. Reassuring words, which make one feel that perhaps sharia hasn't yet entirely conquered Britain. Humbling words – or so, at least, one can hope – that will lead Farage, Phillips, and others to re-examine their readiness to embrace the Leeds Crown Court's actions, which the High Court has now rebuked with remarkable bluntness and comprehensiveness. For the time being, at least, Tommy is free, and those of us who have described him, with outrage, as having been railroaded have been thoroughly vindicated.

THE ACLU WON'T REST UNTIL EVERY ILLEGAL GETS IN

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
August 1, 2018

After all the wailing about the children streaming across our wide-open, wall-less border, there was very little media interest in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday on this very subject. Knowing facts could interfere with their showboating displays of compassion. 

Among the facts journalists might have learned is that, although the Constitution technically gives Congress the power to write laws, it turns out our immigration laws are written by the ACLU. 

The children clamoring across our border can't be held for more than 20 days. This isn't because Congress, after hearings, debate and negotiation, passed a law. The 20-day rule was the ACLU's innovation. 

The Alien Civil Liberties Union brought endless lawsuits, resulting in a 1997 "settlement agreement" between two parties who appeared to be opposed, but were actually on the same side: the pro-open borders Janet Reno Justice Department versus the pro-open borders ACLU. No, no -- not the briar patch, ACLU! Anything but that! 

The 20-day limit is unfortunate because, from capture to final order, an immigration proceeding takes 30 to 40 days. Illegals who are detained at the border cost the taxpayers $1,600 to remove. By contrast, releasing illegals, even under the much-celebrated "alternatives to detention" (ankle monitors and "community supervision"), costs U.S. taxpayers $75,000 per removal -- and most of them don't ever get removed. By some estimates, 90 percent don’t even show up for their hearings. 

The biggest spike in illegal border crossings came after Dolly Gee, an Obama-appointed federal district court judge in California, announced in 2015 that not only "children," but also any adults traveling with them, had to be released into our country after 20 days. 

I wonder if Judge Gee's order created any sort of incentive. Drag some unfortunate child across thousands of miles of desert and ... YOU WIN! You're in and will most likely never be caught and deported. Arrive alone and you will be detained and probably removed after 30 days.

How insane was that ruling? It was too much even for the Ninth Circuit, which ruled that the free pass applies only to "the children." (Child defined as "anyone who claims to be under 18 years old.") Drug dealers, coyotes and scam artists would have to wait for Rachel Maddow to cry about SEPARATING FAMILIES! for their free passes. 

If the kids can't be held for longer than 20 days and the parents can't be separated from their (alleged) children, then the only option is to release both adults and children into the U.S. As Matthew Albence, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official, said, Judge Gee effectively imposed "catch and release" on the entire country. 

Members of Congress pass laws to stop child trafficking -- and then the ACLU comes in and creates a gigantic incentive to engage in child trafficking. 

The parents are so broken up about being separated from "their" children that hundreds of them have gone home without them. Reams of articles hysterically claimed that the evil Trump administration tricked these super-involved parents into signing forms they couldn't understand! 

-- "Migrant parents were misled into waiving rights to family reunification, ACLU tells court" -- The Washington Post, July 26 2018 

-- "Immigrant Parents Unwittingly Signed Away Right to Reunite With Children, Lawyers Say" -- Huffington Post, 07/25/2018 

-- "'Why Did You Leave Me?' The Migrant Children Left Behind as Parents Are Deported'" -- The New York Times, July 27, 2018 

Nowhere will you read that the form the parents signed was written by the ACLU. 

Liberals don't care about kids. They want to wreck our country. 

More than 700,000 illegals who were caught sneaking into our country -- not the 40 million we didn't catch -- are now living here free. Really free: free health care, free housing, free food. Last year, with a force less than half the size of the New York City Police Department, ICE removed more than 100,000 illegal aliens with criminal convictions. 

At $75,000 per removal and assuming 80 percent are ordered removed, it will cost taxpayers approximately $42 billion to remove the 700,000 illegals the ACLU made us release, forget the ones we never caught in the first place. That's just procedural costs -- not the costs in welfare, schooling, vaccinations, dental care, drunk driving accidents, MS-13 violence and the ongoing heroin epidemic. 

How much would that wall cost, again? 

Today's Tune: Bob Dylan - Blowing In The Wind (Live, March 1963)

Bob Dylan 1960s Live Rarities Collection Gets Wide Release

By Andy Greene

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/bob-dylan-1960s-live-rarities-collection-gets-wide-release-701900/

July 23, 2018

A two-CD set of live Bob Dylan recordings taped at concerts between 1962 to 1966 previously available only in Japan will be released worldwide on July 27th. Live 1962 – 1966: Rare Performances from The Copyright Collections begins with solo acoustic tunes taped at Gerde’s Folk City in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1962, continues with major moments from his folk career (including Dylan’s 1963 headlining show at Carnegie Hall) and concludes with songs from his legendary 1965/66 electric tour where he enraged folk purists by playing with a rock band.

The songs are drawn from copyright protection releases that Sony has quietly released in extremely limited numbers over the past six years. They’re a result of European copyright law that stipulates any recording enters the public domain that goes unreleased for 50 years. Only extreme fans will have the patience to wade through the repetitive, un-curated original copyright protection releases, so this new set cherry-picks the most interesting moments. They include the earliest known version of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a duet with Joan Baez on “When the Ship Comes In” taped shortly before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington and a scorching “Ballad of a Thin Man” where Dylan is backed by The Hawks in Scotland.

Dylan resumes his Never Ending Tour on July 27th with a show at the Oympic Gymnastics Arena in Seoul, South Korea. He’ll then spend a month playing gigs all across Asia and Australia, wrapping up August 28th at the Horncastle Arena in Christchurch, New Zealand. As of now, his only American date on the books for the fall is an October 13th show at the WinStar World Casino and Resort in Thackerville, Oklahoma.

Bob Dylan – Live 1962 – 1966: Rare Performances from The Copyright Collections Track List

Disc 1

1. Blowin’ In The Wind – April 16, 1962 – Gerde’s Folk City, New York City, New York
2. Corrina, Corrina – April 16, 1962 – Gerde’s Folk City, New York City, New York
3. John Brown – April 12, 1963 – Town Hall, New York City, New York
4. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right – April 12, 1963 – Town Hall, New York City, New York
5. Bob Dylan’s Dream – April 12, 1963 – Town Hall, New York City, New York
6. Seven Curses – April 12, 1963 – Town Hall, New York City, New York
7. Boots of Spanish Leather – April 12, 1963 – Town Hall, New York City, New York
8. Masters of War – October 26, 1963 – Carnegie Hall, New York City, New York
9. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll – October 26, 1963 – Carnegie Hall, New York City, New York
10. When The Ship Comes In – August 28, 1963 – March on Washington, Washington, D.C.
11. The Times They Are A-Changin’ – May 17, 1964 – Royal Festival Hall, London, England
12. Girl From The North Country – May 17, 1964 – Royal Festival Hall, London, England
13. Mr. Tambourine Man – May 17, 1964 – Royal Festival Hall, London, England
14. It Ain’t Me, Babe – May 17, 1964 – Royal Festival Hall, London, England
15. To Ramona – July 26, 1964 – Newport Folk Festival, Freebody Park, Newport, Rhode Island
16. Chimes of Freedom – May 17, 1964 – Royal Festival Hall, London, England

Disc 2

1. One Too Many Mornings – June 1, 1965 – BBC Studios, London, England
2. It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) – April 30, 1965 – The Oval, City Hall, Sheffield, England
3. Love Minus Zero/No Limit – May 1, 1965 – The Odeon, Liverpool, England
4. Gates of Eden – May 7, 1965 – Free Trade Hall, Manchester, England
5. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue – May 1, 1965 – The Odeon, Liverpool, England
6. She Belongs to Me – May 10, 1965 – Royal Albert Hall, London, England
7. Maggie’s Farm – September 3, 1965 – Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, California
8. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train to Cry – July 25, 1965 – Newport Folk Festival, Freebody Park, Newport, Rhode Island
9. Desolation Row – April 13, 1966 – TCN 9 TV, Sydney, Australia
10. Baby, Let Me Follow You Down – May 11, 1966 – Capitol Theatre, Cardiff, Wales
11. I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met) – May 11, 1966 – Capitol Theatre, Cardiff, Wales
12. Ballad of a Thin Man – May 20, 1966 – ABC Theatre, Edinburgh, Scotland
13. Visions of Johanna – May 6, 1966 – ABC Theatre, Belfast, Northern Ireland

Not So Rotten in Denmark

They're not turning things around, but at least they're trying to slow down the decline.

Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270880/not-so-rotten-denmark-bruce-bawer

August 1, 2018

On July 1, the New York Times ran a long article by Ellen Barry and Martin Selsoe Sorensen headlined “In Denmark, Harsh New Laws for Immigrant ‘Ghettos.’” How harsh? Henceforth, starting at the age of one, children living in designated “ghettos” – in other words, “low-income and heavily Muslim enclaves” – have to spend at least 25 hours a week receiving instruction in Danish values, “including the traditions of Christmas and Easter, and Danish language.” Parents who refuse to obey may lose their welfare payments.

Given the proven failure (over decades) of innumerable Muslim immigrants in Denmark to learn Danish, find jobs, and otherwise integrate into Danish society – not to mention the tendency of young people who've grown up in those “enclaves” to join gangs, commit violence, and express open hostility to native Danes and their culture – these laws sound eminently reasonable. In fact, anyone aware of the scale of the problem might well pronounce them tame and insufficient. But not the Times. Barry and Sorensen describe the new laws not as a responsible attempt to prevent the kind of social and economic collapse looming in next-door Sweden, and to preserve a free, safe, and solvent Denmark for future generations of ethnic Danes and the descendants of immigrants, but rather as a “tough” and “sinister” expression of the Danish government's “ire.”

One law that the Times writers single out for disdain “would impose a four-year prison sentence on immigrant parents who force their children to make extended visits to their country of origin...in that way damaging their 'schooling, language and well-being.'” Barry and Sorensen plainly find this law unspeakably severe. One wonders if they know what they're talking about. The fact is that countless Muslim parents in Europe send their kids “back home” for years at a time – it's called “dumping” – so that they can attend Koran schools, soak up Islamic codes of conduct, and (most important) be shielded from such abhorrent Western phenomena as individual liberty and sexual equality.

As it happens, this practice has been studied extensively. It represents a profound danger to the children involved – girls especially – as well as to the Western countries to which they eventually return. In her 2001 book But the Greatest of These Is Freedom: The Consequences of Immigration in Europe (2011), Hege Storhaug of Norway's Human Rights Service explained that “girls are sent abroad so that they won't be able to live on equal terms with males and enjoy the right to choose their own spouses”; some of them, moreover, “are sent abroad at puberty to be prepared for marriage – to be prepared, that is, to be good wives who live up to the demands and standards set by men in their families' homeland.” Is a four-year prison sentence too tough a penalty for parents who do such things to their children? No, especially when you consider that Danish prisons could be mistaken for luxury hotels while the madrassas in which these people enroll their kids look like, well, prisons – and the marriages (usually cousin marriages) into which those girls end up being forced are, in all but name, prison sentences.

Barry and Sorensen interviewed two critics of the new laws – a pair of Muslim sisters whom they depict as model citizens and describe as being fluent in Danish (but who are also, bemusingly, on welfare). “Danish politics is just about Muslims now,” one of the sisters complained. “I don’t know when they will be satisfied with us.” Gee, maybe when you stop bleeding the Danish treasury dry? Maybe when the 30,000 or so members of your “community” across Europe who belong to Islamic terrorist cells stop plotting murderous mayhem? Sister #2 griped that “her daughter was being taught so much about Christmas in kindergarten that she came home begging for presents from Santa Claus.” Sounds like a salutary change from what's happening elsewhere in Western Europe, where, as part of nefarious propaganda campaigns, non-Muslim kids are routinely taken on school trips to mosques, shown how to put on a hijab, and taught to recite the shahada – all of which the Times and newspapers like it routinely celebrate. “Nobody should tell me,” Sister #2 added, “whether or how my daughter should go to preschool....I’d rather lose my benefits than submit to force.” Fine. Get a job.

Toward the end of their piece, Barry and Sorensen dutifully quoted a handful of Danes who enthusiastically support the new measures. One woman mentioned her shock at being invited to a wedding only to discover that the guests were separated by sex. Another said, “We pay their rent, their clothing, their food, and then they come in broken Danish and say, ‘We can’t work because we’ve got a pain.’” A third observed: “You could say, of course, parents have the right to bring up their own kids....We would say they do not have the right to destroy the future freedom of their children.” Nevertheless, in classic Times sob-story fashion, the piece concluded with a quote from a Muslim high-school student who warned that the new laws, however well-intentioned, will only serve to bring about the “parallel society” that Danes are “so afraid of.” What malarkey! Those parallel societies already exist all over Western Europe, and the Danish government is doing more than probably any of its counterparts in Western Europe to eradicate them – and thereby save its people, their society, and their values from everything that those parallel societies portend. 

Two days after the Times lambasted the new Danish laws, Time's Amro Ali went even further, comparing Denmark's actions on Muslims to – yes – Nazi Germany's treatment of Jews. “The legislation reads like a 19th century missionary enterprise, a colonial experiment to civilize the brown folks,” groused Ali. No, that missionary impulse was part of the reason why one set of Danish leaders after another, against all reason, persisted in flooding their tiny country with unassimilable hordes from a culture that could hardly more different from their own. As for the bit about “the brown folks,” color has nothing to do with it; Hindus, for example, have proven to be not a burden and a threat but a boon to Europe.

No, the new Danish laws are all about the unique danger that Islam represents, and represent nothing more or less than a noble endeavor to keep a small free country from becoming part of a totalitarian caliphate. In his indictment of Denmark, Ali used pretty much every word one might expect: “divisive,” “illiberal,” “bigotry,” “xenophobic,” “discriminatory,” “exclusionary,” “[h]atred,” “fear.” If Ali sincerely doesn't understand Denmark's actions, he might contemplate his own magazine's' dilemma: the one-mighty Time is now on its last legs, a sad shadow of its former self, precisely because its owners failed to respond competently to the profound challenge posed by the rise of the Internet. Denmark's leaders, too, face a profound challenge – that of Islamization, which threats to bring down their small jewel of a homeland – and they're doing everything they can to try to keep their own little vessel afloat.

To be sure, three weeks before the Times and Time started wringing their hands over Denmark's cruelty to Muslims, the Guardian was on the case, with reporter Richard Orange filing an article headlined “Denmark swings right on immigration – and Muslims feel besieged.” Wrote Orange: “The Social Democrats’ leader, Mette Frederiksen, has called Islam a barrier to integration, said some Muslims 'do not respect the Danish judicial system,' that some Muslim women refuse to work for religious reasons, and that Muslim girls are subject to 'massive social control.'” All true. “She has also called for all Muslim schools in the country to be closed.” Good. All they teach is fanaticism and hate. Orange interviewed one Istahil Hussein, 36, who “says the change in Danish opinion so disturbing that she is thinking of returning to Somalia, the country she left 18 years ago.” Good idea. Don't let the door hit you on your way out. Like his colleagues at the Times and Time, Orange represented Denmark's actions as a product of unfounded prejudice. There was no mention of, say, classrooms full of Danish-born children who don't speak Danish or of imams who preach conquest of Europe.

Speaking of which, on July 24,  Danish prosecutors charged Imam Mundhir Abdallah, who preaches at a mosque in the Nørrebro district of Copenhagen, with delivering a sermon in which he read the following sacred text: “Judgment Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.” It was the first time the Danes ever prosecuted a Muslim cleric for urging the murder of Jews. It may have been the first time any Western European country ever did such a thing. In reporting this news, France24 further noted that five Muslim hate preachers had been banned from Denmark in May of this year– this, while in the U.K., for instance, the government and media soft-pedal mass Muslim gang rapes and deny entry not to Muslim hate preachers but to critics of Islam.

There's more. As The Local reported on July 11, “people who have lived in Denmark for over three years will have to pay for interpreters if required during medical treatment.” Good. One opponent of this measure “rejected the argument that patients should be expected to understand Danish after three years in the country.” Many people, she argued, “have come here for various reasons and have not been able to learn Danish within the three years.” Yes, that's precisely the problem: it's called a lack of effort. When I moved to Norway, I took language classes, studied hard, and was able to pass an advanced fluency test within a few months. I was over forty – way past the optimum language-learning age. Why should Danes do anything whatsoever for people who don't think a free ride in their country is worth taking that kind of trouble?

On July 26 came another story. These days, it turns out, Denmark is receiving fewer tourists from Muslim countries than its neighbors Germany, Norway, and Sweden. The reason? Partly its ban on face-covering veils, partly its ban on halal slaughter. Why visit such an Islamophobic country, after all, when, as the Resett website pointed out, there are plenty of German and Swiss hotels in which each room's furnishings include a Koran and a compass (so you can figure out the direction to Mecca, of course)?

When it comes to resisting Islamization, in short, Denmark is doing a far more impressive job than most of its Western European neighbors. Still, as much as the mainstream media and the rest of the left may squawk with outrage at its attempts to rein in the advance of Islam within its borders, these attempts may all be too little, too late. In a profoundly bleak talk given last year, Lars Hedegaard, the gutsy and eloquent Danish critic of Islam (who is a survivor of both a jihadist assassination attempt and a hate-speech trial), maintained that “once the Muslim population exceeds, say, five percent, it's game over.” Muslims currently make up about 5.3% of Danish inhabitants. Let's hope he's wrong. The Danes, of all people in Western Europe, deserve for him to be wrong.

America’s Next Civil War Will Be Worse Than Our Last

By H.W. Crocker III

https://spectator.org/americas-next-civil-war-will-be-worse-than-our-last/

July 26, 2018

Captain George Custer and General Alfred Pleasonton in Virginia (Timothy O'Sullivan)

In the summer of 1862, just weeks before the Battle of Sharpsburg (or Antietam) — the bloodiest single day of fighting in American history — Union Captain George Armstrong Custer attended the wedding of Confederate Captain John “Gimlet” Lea at Bassett Hall in Williamsburg, Virginia, as best man. The Union officer was dressed in blue, the Confederate officer in grey, and Custer being Custer spent the next two weeks flirting with the Southern belle cousin of the bride, even joining her in singing “Dixie.”

At one point she told him, “You ought to be in our army.”

“What would you give me if I resigned my commission in the Northern army and joined the Southern?”

“You are not in earnest, are you?”

He wasn’t, of course. Custer was nothing if not loyal, and he believed that he was bound to the Union by the oath he had sworn at West Point, whatever his affection for Southern officers and their ladies.

Such gallantry seems unthinkable today, when members of the Trump administration are hounded from restaurants and theatres, and Confederate officers like John Lea, if they are remembered at all, are considered precursors of the German National Socialists, and their once famous and respected commanders like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jeb Stuart have their statues toppled and banished from public squares, their names stripped from public schools, and their memories spat upon and disgraced.

The difference between the America of today and the America of what seems like just yesterday is that we once had a common culture. As recently as 1990, Ken Burns could make a Civil War documentary for PBS and let historian Shelby Foote wax eloquent on the martial prowess of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest —  something that now would likely get them both tarred, feathered, and Twitter-banned.

Click on the link below to read the rest of the article:

https://spectator.org/americas-next-civil-war-will-be-worse-than-our-last/

Pascal’s Fire & 8 Minutes Till Darkness

By ROD DREHER
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/pascal-fire-catholicism-christianity-eight-minutes-till-darkness/
July 29, 2018


Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) studying the cycloid, engraved on the tablet he is holding in his left hand; the scattered papers at his feet are his Pensées, the open book his Lettres provinciales. (Louvre)

I had a long late breakfast this morning with a Catholic friend, a native of Baton Rouge who now lives in New England, but is in town visiting his family. When we sat down at the restaurant, I mentioned to him that I had seen this tweet from a very solid Catholic priest friend:

Fr. Matt Fish@matthewjfish

Gospel today: can we please stop talking about sharing the loaves? Instead: mountains and theophanies, new Moses, Passover meal, new Exodus, anticipation of eschatological banquet, sacrifice of the lamb, kingship of Jesus, miracle vs sign, all acceptable alternatives.

6:51 AM - Jul 29, 2018

• 64
• See Fr. Matt Fish's other Tweets

Twitter Ads info and privacy

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

To which I had responded (on Twitter) by quoting part of Blaise Pascal’s note at the end of a late-night mystical vision in 1654. Here is the entire quote from Pascal, for whom this vision occasioned a deeper conversion:

FIRE.

GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob
not of the philosophers and of the learned.
Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
GOD of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Your GOD will be my God.
Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD.
He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Grandeur of the human soul.
Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
I have departed from him:
They have forsaken me, the fount of living water.
My God, will you leave me?
Let me not be separated from him forever.
This is eternal life, that they know you, the one true God, and the one that you sent, Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
I left him; I fled him, renounced, crucified.
Let me never be separated from him.
He is only kept securely by the ways taught in the Gospel:
Renunciation, total and sweet.
Complete submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.
Eternally in joy for a day’s exercise on the earth.
May I not forget your words. Amen.

My friend shook his head, smiling sardonically. “I had the ‘miracle of sharing’ homily at mass this morning!” he said. He was angry about it.

This is a sad old joke for Catholics. When the Gospel reading is the story of Christ feeding the multitude with just a few loaves and fishes, some Catholic priests (like, um, this guy) are in the habit of downplaying the supernatural core of the event, and saying that the real miracle here was the “miracle of sharing” — the idea that the generosity Christ inspired in people’s hearts is what that story is about. The Catholic blogger Amy Welborn once wrote about this phenomenon (which some Protestants have had to endure too); the unnamed acquaintance in her story is me. I was still Catholic then, and had been at mass that day in St. Francisville, when I heard the priest give that lame homily. When I politely confronted him about it after mass, he pulled me out of his way.

The “Miracle Of Sharing” is shorthand among certain orthodox Catholics as a symbol for the desacralization of the faith by priests who don’t really believe in it, not as Pascal’s fire. My friend this morning said that listening to that lazy homily this morning at mass, with the meaning of the Cardinal McCarrick scandal weighing heavily on his mind, infuriated him. I blog here about our ensuing conversation with his permission, though I’m not going to name him.

“You remember how you had on your blog a couple of weeks ago that stuff about the final pagan generation?” he said.

He was referring to this post about how pagan Roman elites in the fourth century complacently believed that the old religion was going to endure. Even though the ground itself had shifted under their feet throughout the century, as Christian conversions continued throughout the Empire, they didn’t see what was happening around them. All the outward forms of pagan religion — the temples, the shrines, the public celebrations — were still more or less in place, even though the inner light of pagan belief was fast dimming. Then suddenly, paganism was gone. Historian Edward Watts, author of 2015’s The Final Pagan Generation, writes about how these elites turned out to have been the last people educated and formed intellectually in classical pagan culture. They did not recognize what was happening to their civilization. It had always been pagan, and always would be, they thought … until suddenly, it wasn’t anymore, and never was again.

Anyway, my friend said this morning that he agrees with me that Christians today — he was talking about his fellow Catholics in particular, but nodded when I said this is true of all Christians in the West — are like the Final Pagan Generation.

“It takes eight minutes for light to reach earth from the sun,” he said. “If the sun stopped exploding, if it went dark, it would be eight minutes before we knew it. I feel like we’re  living in that eight minutes now, about the faith.”

He explained that from what he sees around him, the Catholic faith is pretty much a dead letter. My friend is a deeply convinced believer, but the corruption in the clergy and in the episcopate has left him reeling. We’ve been friends for a while, and I know that he’s been undeceived for years about the real state of things in the Church. But the Cardinal McCarrick thing seems to have been a breaking point for him. He’s filled with disgust and anger at the Catholic bishops, doubting now how many of them have faith at all. How can you believe in Jesus Christ but facilitate so much corruption, sexual and otherwise? he said.

My friend is no Puritan. But he has hit a wall, and he has hit it hard. The “miracle of sharing” sermon stood out to him as a symbol of the total spiritual mediocrity of the Church in our time and place. The house is burning down around them, and sentimental priests can’t stop talking about that warm feeling in their hearts.

“They think they’re giving us mercy, but they’re not,” said my friend, who has suffered some serious setbacks in his own life in the past couple of years. “I’mdesperate for mercy. I need it so much in my life. The hard truths that the Church teaches, that’s real mercy, not this fake stuff. Those truths give me what I need to bear up to all these trials. To live sacrificially when the world says the easy thing would be to give up.”

“To be honest, I don’t know if I’ve ever looked up to a priest as a spiritual father,” he continued. “I guess I had to learn a long time ago not to expect anything from them other than giving out the Sacrament.”

“Where I live, the Church is over. It’s done,” he said. “I was at mass a few weeks ago, and looked around, and my family were the only people there under 70. Nobody else is coming.”

It’s true that New England used to be the most Catholic part of the United States. Now it is one of the most secular. My friend says that when the grey hairs start to die off, very few believers will be around to replace them. And yet, there’s little sense of urgency in the Church there, he says — at least not the kind of urgency inspiring the clergy and the laity to search for Pascal’s Fire. They’re just content to fade into the mist.

It’s different in south Louisiana, he said — but this is little consolation. He grew up in this place, immersed in Catholic culture. “I feel like living in New England puts me ten to fifteen years ahead of y’all down here,” he said. “What we’re living through up north is coming here, but nobody seems to understand that.”

Far too many people in the South take comfort in the generally Christian culture here, said my friend. He wants me to understand that he’d take that over the spiritual desolation he’s living and raising his Catholic family in now, but it’s still a very serious problem, because it breeds complacency. Everybody’s happy sending their kids to Catholic school, going to mass on Sunday, hearing about the Miracle of Sharing, and consoling themselves that it’s all going pretty well now, and always will.

Meanwhile, he said, the faith is dying in the hearts of the middle-aged and the young.

“I don’t think it’s going to be the kind of thing where it just gradually declines,” he said. “I think it’s going to be more like one of these things where people just stop showing up. It’s going to be abrupt. Nobody’s going to see it coming, but when it happens, they’re not going to be surprised, either.”

Of course I told him that this is not just a Catholic experience, but a general Christian experience today. It plays out differently among Evangelicals, for example, but it’s there. If it weren’t, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism wouldn’t be the true American religion. An Evangelical pastor friend told me recently over the desperation among so many Evangelicals, always looking for the Next Big Thing — praise bands! smoke machines! — to keep emotions high and the troops rallied, and to keep people from noticing that the churches have been hollowed out from within.

None of this is new with me, of course. My Catholic breakfast friend and I talk about this kind of thing whenever we see each other. What made today’s conversation stand out to me was the power of his “eight minutes to darkness” metaphor — that, and his visceral post-McCarrick anger at the hierarchy and clergy of his own Church. To emphasize: it’s not only about toleration, even encouragement, of sexual sin and corruption, but satisfaction with spiritual “mediocrity” (his word) general in the Catholic Church today. That last one is an accusation that could accurately and justly be leveled at nearly all of us Christians, Catholic and otherwise.

We Christians are living out the Eight Minutes Till Darkness. If we are going to have the ability to see clearly when the lights go out, we are going to have to start tending Pascal’s fire in our own hearts, our own families, our own Christian schools, and our own religious communities. This is what the Benedict Option is about. This, I think, is why people like my older Millennial friend visiting from New England, as well as young Catholics in Europe, are so enthusiastic about the Benedict Option: because they already live in once-Christian lands across which the shadow of night has fallen.

For American Catholics, the McCarrick affair is an apocalypse in the strict sense of the word — that is, an unveiling. Believe it or not, this can be a blessing. It’s better to know the truth, and to go forward undeceived, than to operate under false pretenses. As angry as my Catholic friend is about this corruption, and as little confidence as he has in the bishops and the clergy, he is still committed to the Catholic faith. Now he has to figure out where to go from here, as a husband and a father and a soldier who salutes the uniform of the officer class, but has little to no faith in their ability to lead.

I don’t want to leave you on an anti-clerical note. It’s understandable, given all the news about clerical corruption, and besides, nobody wants to be taken advantage of by bishops who say “we are one body, one body in Christ” as a way of leaning on the laity to pay off the debts the clergy have incurred for molesting children and (in the case of bishops) tolerating it for decades. However, it would be self-serving for the laity to blame the clergy entirely. I’m thinking as I write this of a very fine young Orthodox priest I know who is in a difficult position. He did not tell me this, but someone who knows him passed on to me that no matter what he has done to try to engage his fairly large congregation with actual Orthodoxy (as distinct from ethnic-festival Orthodoxy), they resist and try to shut him down. They don’t want to be bothered with it. They’re fine with Miracle Of Sharing™ Christianity.

A Mainline Protestant friend of mine’s father got mad at his pastor once, for what I was told was good reason. After that, though, the man fell into the habit of finding fault with every pastor the church had. It wasn’t that the old man was always wrong, I was given to understand, but that the old man (who wasn’t old at all when this started) did not compensate for the clergy’s failing by either finding another church, or redoubling his own spiritual disciplines. Instead, he griped about church, and stopped going; his wife went along with it. He told himself and his family that he didn’t need to go to a church building and listen to boring sermons to find God. So he quit going to church, though he told himself that if the clergy would ever get its act together, he might start coming again.

For decades this went on. The old man finally died. I’m told that today, you will find none of that old man’s descendants in that church. Would things have been different for that family had the old man and his wife met the crisis of clerical mediocrity differently, instead of lazily blaming the institution for all their own failings? Maybe, maybe not. But at least their kids and grandkids would have had a better shot at holding onto the faith. In that family, the eight minutes till darkness passed a while back. In my friend’s late father, I very much see the attitude that my own late, Christian but non-churchgoing father had: believing that the faith would always be here because it always had been here, and that the church was like a public utility: always there to make sure that the lights would come on.

He was wrong. It’s going to be like that for all of us, if we don’t kindle Pascal’s fire, and seek the face of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

UPDATE: Well, whaddaya know, here’s what Pope Francis said today about the Loaves & Fishes reading Gospel reading:

Then, at the end of the account, when all were satiated, Jesus asked His disciples to gather the pieces left over, so that nothing would be wasted. And I would like to propose to you this phrase of Jesus: “Gather up the fragments left over, that nothing may be lost” (v. 12). I think of people who are hungry and how much leftover food we throw away . . . Let each one of us think: the food that’s left over at lunch, at dinner, where does it go? In my home, what’s done with this leftover food? Is it thrown out? No. If you have this habit, I give you advice: talk with your grandparents who lived after the War and ask them what they did with leftover food. Never throw away leftover food. It’s re-heated or given to someone who can eat it, who is in need. Never throw away leftover food. This is advice but also an examination of conscience: what is done at home with leftover food?

Let us pray to the Virgin Mary, so that in the world programs dedicated to development, to supplies, to solidarity prevail and not those of hatred, of armaments and of war.

That’s the end of his six-minute homily, but it gives you the gist. If you want to listen to the whole thing, it starts shortly after the 3:00 mark, and the concluding passage above begins about 8:30: