By Selwyn Duke

In 2017, Time magazine followed up on its 1966 “Is God Dead?” cover with one asking, “Is Truth Dead?” Since these two things are related, perhaps it’s surprising it took them so long.

Truth, properly understood, can’t die, of course. But people’s belief in it can. This has long been happening and is why, as my longtime readers know, the Truth vs. moral relativism/nihilism issue has been a continual theme in my writing ever since I unsheathed the pen of punditry in 2002. Yet now, suddenly, this matter is becoming a more common theme in commentary in general. The reason?

The West’s departure from Truth has become so obvious, and its consequences so dire, that people are increasingly recognizing it as what I’ve long called “the characteristic philosophical disease of our time.”

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By Selwyn Duke

“Haters of humanity,” the Romans called the early Christians, whom they infamously would sometimes throw to the lions. Much later in history, the French revolutionaries would try eliminating Christianity by, in part, creating a new calendar with 10-day weeks excluding the Lord’s Day. Mexico’s revolutionary government, beginning in 1926, instituted anti-clerical laws that prescribed the arrest of priests for wearing clerical garb in public or criticizing the government. Spain’s “Red Terror” (1936-1939) saw the execution of more than 6,800 clergy and religious people and the persecution of religious communities. The Soviets imprisoned and executed religious leaders and introduced “scientific atheism,” while the Nazis aimed to replace Christianity with neo-paganism and, as a ploy to seduce people away from the authentic faith, trumpeted what they called “Positive Christianity.” (It portrayed Jesus as a Nordic character persecuted by Jewish authorities.) 

Yet there’s a notable point of history here: These Roman, French revolutionary, Mexican- and Spanish-leftist, Soviet, and Nazi persecutors are long gone.

Christianity remains.

Eternal Faith

Rome’s poets famously dubbed their metropolis the “Eternal City,” but what the persecutors among them didn’t know was that they were tangling with the eternal faith. (Or perhaps some did know — or at least did thus fear.) But all the victimizers became the vanquished and, if we could anthropomorphize these movements, we could say that they form Christianity’s blessed trail of dead bodies.

One of the many things that should give Christians hope and bring them joy….

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By Selwyn Duke

While conservatives sometimes like to say that Bill Maher is getting red-pilled, it’s more like he’s getting pink-pilled: He increasingly recognizes the insanity of today’s Left, but still accepts liberalism’s basic suppositions. In this vein, being unlikely to value-signal, Maher doesn’t act as if shows of style are substitutes for the substance prescribed by leftist orthodoxy. Then again, he’s apparently also not amenable to always embracing that substance personally. A good example of this occurred on the HBO host’s Club Random podcast last week, when he featured as guest fellow comedian Dana Carvey.

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By Selwyn Duke

Since I’m going to be criticizing a now widely accepted phenomenon, this piece may evoke eyerolls from some supporters. So be it, because certain things need to be said.

I must confess that with the way many of my fellow adults behave today, it can make me ashamed to be one. I almost sometimes feel as if I want to apologize to the children for the example the contemporary grown-up world now sets. We often lament, and rightly so, how disrespectful many modern youths are, yet a prerequisite for commanding respect is being respectable. There is little respectable about modern American culture.

Whether or not communist activist Willi Münzenberg (1889-1940) actually said “We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks,” he might as well have. It’s not just that adults now show children indecent images in sex education’s name, rubber stamp elementary school Satan clubs in deference to “religious freedom” and tell kids they can switch sexes just by willing it. It’s also what the “good” people fighting these abominations often do.

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By Selwyn Duke

It’s a shocking story.

Imagine you complain on Facebook about your child’s school curriculum. You then get some feedback:

An army officer calls you an “extremist” and writes that military “leadership have had the Security Forces working with multiple state and local law enforcement agencies to monitor” your situation.

Sure enough, the local police chief then pressures you to delete your social media post.

You might wonder if the scene of this incident, which did occur, was China or Russia. Except for one thing: Your complaint was about your 7-year-old daughter being exposed to “pansexuality,” something that, for all of Beijing’s and Moscow’s faults, you’d never find in their schools.

In fact, this happened in these United States of America.

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By Selwyn Duke

Referencing how our powers that be are all implicated in mandating the Covid “vaccines” and thus will never expose their sometimes deadly side effects, I wrote last month that my “only hope is that a nation with a less compromised medical establishment (perhaps Sweden or Japan?) will investigate and expose the truth about the [drugs].” This may now happen, but it turns out that the place shining the light of truth will be the Sunshine State, where Governor Ron DeSantis has vowed to hold Big Pharma’s feet to the fire for false claims about its Covid gene-modification agents (GMAs, aka “vaccines”).

DeSantis made his “comments at a private Republican Party of Florida (RPOF) event at the Florida Governor’s Mansion…. He resolved to work with Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo ‘to hold these manufacturers accountable,’” Florida Jolt reports.

“I have Surgeon General in Florida Dr. Joseph Ladapo, who’s been really, really strong of just fighting back the narrative and the phony things that people are trying to do and focus on the evidence and so we are gonna work to hold these manufacturers accountable for this mRNA because they said there was [sic] no side effects and we know that there have been a lot,” Jolt relates DeSantis as saying.

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By Selwyn Duke

Canceling a scheduled event at the very last minute simply because you don’t like the group that booked it doesn’t sound like a display of dignity. Nonetheless, protecting “dignity” was one of the reasons a Richmond, Virginia, restaurant cited when doing just that after learning that it would be serving a pro-life Christian organization that opposes same-sex “marriage.”

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By Selwyn Duke

Not too many Americans want to see their land become more like China, but it is doing so in at least one particular way: The United States is secularizing — and rapidly. In fact, more than a third of Americans under 30 and 23 percent of adults overall now claim no religious affiliation. This still pales in comparison to China’s corresponding 91 percent figure, but such people constituted only about seven percent of the U.S. population in the early 1990s.

This phenomenon has serious implications. For one thing, church attendance is an excellent predictor of voting patterns, with those attending services regularly breaking Republican (being conservative) and atheists largely supporting Democrats (being liberal). The ideological aspect of this pattern is witnessed throughout the Western world, mind you. For example, Sweden, considered by many the Occident’s most “liberal” country, is also its most secular, with 73 percent of the population claiming atheist or non-religious status.

In this Sweden exemplifies Europe’s longstanding secularization, a process the U.S. had once resisted.

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By Selwyn Duke

It was already the case that certain conservative websites have had to eliminate their comment sections under threat from Big Tech, which has the ability to take those sites offline (as it did with Parler). Now the New York state government has gotten in on the act, instituting a “hate speech” law that compels any site allowing comments to police its users’ speech — or face punishment. As law professor Eugene Volokh puts it, the state wants to “conscript” us to “violate the Constitution.”

The law, which took effect Saturday, sparked an 11th-hour lawsuit filed by the nonprofit group Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) on behalf of three plaintiffs: Volokh, who runs the Volokh Conspiracy legal blog; Peter Thiel-backed video site Rumble; and the crowdfunding entity Locals.

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By Selwyn Duke

“What, are they a married couple — or maybe divorced under California law?” That was one incredulous reaction to an incredible situation:

When the U.S. men’s national soccer team beat Iran on Tuesday to advance to the World Cup’s knockout stage, they earned a guaranteed $13 million. But they’re only going to receive $6.5 million. No, the issue isn’t taxes, unless you want to call it the Feminism Tax.

Because the U.S. women’s soccer team is going to get half the men’s money — for doing nothing.

Actually, that’s not entirely accurate because they did do something: complain and agitate and sue for years until capitulation was achieved.

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