News and Views: November 19, 2024

Woke Ideology Is Not Dead and Buried-First Things 

So here’s the point: The return of Donald Trump may pump the brakes on some of the nastier momentum in our culture, but changing its basic direction is a much bigger, and arguably less likely, task. In other words, woke or one of its ideological variants will recover and be back. So how do we turn the culture around?  

   Well, maybe we can’t. Maybe that’s the wrong question. Problems we behaved ourselves into have no silver-bullet cure; no easy escape hatch. But we can at least change our thinking and our actions. Over the past year, I’ve read and reread the Epistle of James a dozen times, especially verse 1:22: “Be doers of the Word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.”

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2,400 anti-Christian hate crimes reported in Europe  The countries that published police statistics on anti-Christian hate crimes in 2023 reported that the majority of incidents targeted places of worship.

   Across Europe, OIDAC documented a total of 232 incidents involving verbal and physical attacks on Christians, supplemented by civil society data. The most common form of violence was vandalism, accounting for 62% of the incidents, including numerous cases involving desecration. Arson attacks made up 10%, threats 8% and physical violence 7%. OIDAC also recorded one case of murder, seven attempted murders and 68 personal attacks on Christians motivated by anti-Christian bias.

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DoJ Reportedly Pushing For Google To Divest Chrome To Dismantle Search Monopoly   The US Department of Justice is reportedly planning to ask a federal judge to force Google's parent company, Alphabet, to sell off its Chrome internet browser, potentially marking one of the biggest tech industry crackdowns in the US in decades.

   On August 5, US District Judge Amit Mehta, Washington, DC, ruled that Google violated antitrust law by spending billions of dollars to create an illegal monopoly as the world's default search engine on smartphones, computers, and tablets. The ruling paved the way for antitrust enforcers to submit a 32-page document about potential remedies for the judge to consider.

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‘Indoctrinating’: U. Oklahoma’s mandatory critical race theory course may violate state law... OU’s education program under fire for course that discusses social justice and ‘critical whiteness in education’ 

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From the Promised Land Into the Wilderness, aka Canada 

This poor lagomorph might have felt differently had she been aware that moving to Canada meant paying $8 for a gallon of gasoline, close to 50% higher food prices across the board, a capital gains tax docking her investments at 67% past a certain relatively moderate limit, an utterly useless carbon tax devastating Canadian households, hamstringing industry and bankrupting farmers, runaway inflation dwarfing that of other G-20 nations, and legislative abominations snaking their way through parliament like Bill C-63 levying fines of up to $70,000 and possible life imprisonment for anonymously reported “hate speech” offenses — that is, for things said or written years ago, said or written today, or that might be said or written in the future. Shades of "Minority Report." One would only have to look to North Korea or Keir Starmer’s terminal U.K. sliding into a socialist nightmare to see the political vector on which Canada has embarked.

Trudeau’s New Low 

So how does Prime Minister Justin Trudeau relate to all of this? Well, he has condemned attacks on churches as ‘unacceptable and wrong’, and his government has made money available to improve churches’ security. Good. However, he has also stated that one of his ‘personal reflections’ is that he ‘understands’ the anger against churches for their schools’ historic crimes...

...That last point is a reckless thing to say, for it will encourage those angry arsonists to continue their deadly and destructive campaign. It would have been better if he had said that anger over past crimes should not lead to crimes in the present, for Christians in Canada today cannot be held responsible for historical abuse they did not commit. Would Trudeau have said he understood the anger of arsonists if they were targeting mosques? Not in a million years.

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Unusual activity reported over Morris County,NJ: multiple large drones spotted flying from the Somerset County border northward and back. Law enforcement has been advised to notify their communications centers of any sightings. Photo taken in Morristown (📸 Josh Wolfson) pic.twitter.com/pSqe6KnwQj

— N. Jerzy Fire Alert (@NJerzyFireAlert) November 19, 2024

Spy Drones? "Unusual Activity" Reported Over Morris County, New Jersey, Near Military Research Facility  This incident in Morris County comes after a fleet of spy drones swarmed some of America's most sensitive national security sites, including Langley Air Force Base on Virginia's shoreline late last year.