News and Views from around the World
The 2010s were the Twilight of the ElitesNo other event in the 2010s is going to eclipse the significance of Donald Trump's presidential victory. After the damage of the Obama era, the U.S. was just one election cycle away from oblivion: under Hillary, the Swamp's takeover of the entire political system would have been completed.
Ordinary people in the U.S. – the kind, as the CEI's Myron Ebell memorably put it, who dig stuff or make stuff or grow stuff – understood this and grabbed their chance to save America while they still could.
A key moment of the UK's 2016 Brexit referendum campaign was when pro-Brexit Nigel Farage sailed up the River Thames towards London's Houses of Parliament in a fleet of fishing boats to be confronted by multi-millionaire pop star Bob Geldof in an expensively chartered floating gin-palace full of champagne- swilling Remainers.
Nothing better symbolised the gulf between the globalist, Davos-style elitist metropolitan types who supported Remain and the working-class makers, doers and fishers who supported Brexit.
Extract from James Delingpole, Breitbart News (UK), Dec. 29, 2019.
The Dark Spell of Feminist Ideology
Feminism has made us suspicious of, and made us doubt the
motivations of, the male half of the human race.
Only the spell of a feminist ideology could have led the British Supreme Court president Baroness Hale and our lawmakers do something as inhuman as abolish "the rule of law that a father is the natural guardian of his legitimate child".
Only the power of feminism still causes us to neglect what has been happening to boys in the education system, where they have become second-class citizens. Only the force of feminism blinds us to the challenges which working-class men (and increasingly middle-class men) face in providing for their families.
It was the feminist distaste for motherhood that created a tax system which prevented mothers from caring for their children at home. And it was feminism which insured a significant swathe of the population would be better off if they lived apart.
Extract from Belinda Brown, The Conservative Woman (UK), Dec. 4, 2019.
Young Hooked on a Brain-eating Drug called Porn
The evidence is in: porn is as addictive as smoking, or more, except
that what smoking does to your lungs, porn does to your brain.
If the evidence is so strong and the damage so deep and pervasive, why is nobody talking about this? In part it is because deep-monied interests have a stake in the status quo. And in very large parts, it is because most of us are now addicts – and like good addicts, we are in denial.
Perhaps it sounds hyperbolic. But what we do know is that large numbers of our civilisation are hooked on a drug that has profound effects on the brain, which we mostly don't understand, except that everything we understand is negative and alarming.
And we are just ten years into the process. If we don't act, pretty soon the next generation will be a generation that largely got hooked on this brain-eating drug as children, whose brains are uniquely vulnerable.
Extract from Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, American Greatness, Dec. 15, 2019.
Christian Ghana a Beacon of Light to the World
The longer I stay in Ghana – and it has only been three days so
far – the more ashamed I am to call myself a Western Christian.
So much of the faith of these African believers stands in such
marked contract to what we find in Australia and the West.
The great majority of the country is Christian (around 77 per cent) and they seem to be on fire, dedicated to the Lord, and willing to stand up against the agenda items that have wreaked havoc in the West. Like most Africans, they really are dead-set against the anti-family agendas found throughout the West.
It is so good to be in a land where family and faith are held in such high regard. In the West they are basically detested, despised, persecuted, and seen as hinderances to progress. Praise God that he is at work in Ghana, seeking to turn the tide of all the mischief and mayhem the West has caused.
As I have said before, things have now gone full circle. Europe and the West were once the place of missionary-sending nations. Thankfully the gospel did take hold in so much of Africa, Asia and Latin America. So now as the West is losing the faith so rapidly, God is using places like Africa to once more shed light in a dark world.
The spiritual centre of gravity has well and truly left the West, and the beacons of light are now nations like Ghana.
Extract from Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch (Australia), October 31, 2019.
Why Christians Lost Fight to Save Marriage
The victories that were won leading to the current situation (in
which polyamory is being mainstreamed and physically healthy
thirteen-year old girls are being subjected to hormone treatments
and mastectomies because they believe they are actually "boys
trapped in girls' bodies") were not inevitable.
They were won because too many Catholics, Evangelicals, and other believers in marriage reality and traditional norms of sexual morality failed to muster the courage to fight.
They cowered in fear. They stood on the sidelines. They wanted "other people" to do the work, contribute the money, and stand boldly for what is true and good and right and just.
But there weren't enough "other people".
Some might say, "this is no time for recriminations". I disagree. This is precisely the time for recriminations. Indeed, there was never a better time.
Standing boldly for what is true and good and right and just is everybody's job; it's not just a job for "other people".
Especially to my fellow Christians, I say it is our job. It comes with the Gospel territory.
Extract from Robert P. George, Public Discourse (Princeton,
NJ), Jan. 5, 2020. 