By Selwyn Duke

The Russian bear has become the big bad wolf to the American left, blamed for everything from winning the election for Donald Trump to “penetrating” the U.S. electric grid to birthing “fake news.” But is liberals' real problem that Russia has become the new national equivalent of the Moral Majority?

An ideological component was integral to the Cold War, with a then more traditionalist West opposing the Marxist Red Menace of the Soviet Union. As Eastern Europe’s communism collapsed, however, relations thawed. But the post-bipolar world has seen an ideological pole shift…

Read the rest here. 

By Selwyn Duke

The side that defines the vocabulary of a debate, wins the debate. So we could ask: as we fight the global-warming scam, why are we using the language of the scammers? It’s harder to combat “carbon” taxes, “carbon” credits and callow “carbon” appeals if we accept that at issue is “carbon.”

Calling CO₂ “carbon” is like calling H₂O “hydrogen.” Carbon is about as useful to a plant aspiring to photosynthesize as a tank of hydrogen is to a dehydrated man in a desert. Carbon dioxide and carbon are not the same thing any more than a fox and foxglove are the same thing.

(more…)

By Selwyn Duke    

With all the focus today on eliminating “hate,” we should ask: Is it at all possible that labeling others “haters” could be motivated by hate?

One person very concerned about hate is Daily Beast writer Sabine Heinlein. A naturalized American who nonetheless still identifies herself as “German,” she complained in a Sunday piece that Americans are “too timid in confronting hate" — and, says she, we need to follow Germans’ lead in combating it.

Read the rest here.

By Selwyn Duke

While German Chancellor Angela Merkel is surrounded by armed guards and cruises about in a bulletproof car, she has urged her countrymen to combat bloody terrorism with “openness” in her New Year’s address. It’s a message causing critics to say she’s an “off her rocker” leader who has set a “world record for cluelessness.”

In fairness, while the Express reports that Merkel advised terrorism be defeated with “love and compassion,” she doesn’t appear to use those words in her speech (though I’m relying on translation — video below). Nonetheless, the address is yet another reiteration of her intent to continue bad policy in the face of withering criticism and waning poll numbers.

Read the rest here.

By Selwyn Duke

If “academic freedom” isn’t the last refuge of a scoundrel, it certainly is a contender. And while academics generally defend the “principle” in principle, one professor who has come to question it is Robert Oscar Lopez.

I wrote about Dr. Lopez and his travails in 2014 and ‘15. At the time he was a tenured professor at California State University, Northridge and was under withering assault for opposing the homosexual agenda, the adoption of children by same-sex couples in particular. He has since resigned from the university after eight years employment, movingly citing a desire to be true to God as his motivation. Now, in a piece provocatively entitled “Academia's Broken, so Why Defend Academic Freedom?” Lopez writes of another epiphany he experienced:

Read the rest here. 

By Selwyn Duke

Climate alarmists are still running about like Chicken Little saying “The sky is falling,” ice is melting, polar bears are dying and soon we’ll all be frying. Yet it isn’t just that the doom-and-gloom climate models have failed, with reports that we’re in a 20-year period of stable or possibly decreasing temperatures. It’s that even if the mercury does rise, so what?

Climate Alarmism Central, The New York Times, let the truth slip recently…

Read the rest here. 

By Selwyn Duke

Most of us wouldn’t criticize a man mourning a friend, but most of us aren’t the politically correct thought police. Never shy about crashing a party — or a funeral — they reared their heads again when comedian Steve Martin paid tribute to his friend Carrie Fisher, who passed away Tuesday at the age of 60.

Martin’s trespass was to send a tweet stating, “When I was a young man, Carrie Fisher was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. She turned out to be witty and bright as well.” The reaction was swift.

What sexism!

What misogyny!

What a pig!

What…what….

What nonsense, I say.

Read the rest here. 

By Selwyn Duke

“The white race is the cancer of human history,” insisted writer Susan Sontag in 1967. Since then, anti-white race-hatred has gained enough currency to breed “white-privilege” theory, a college professor expressing a desire for “white genocide,” and “Problem of Whiteness” courses in academia — the latest example being one disgorged by the University of Wisconsin.

We might not have heard much about the course if it hadn’t been slammed by State Assemblyman Dave Murphy, who complained that it presumes "white people are racist" and that taxpayers should be "expected to pay for this garbage."

Read the rest here. 

By Selwyn Duke

If you’re a Christian businessman who doesn’t want to service a faux wedding, you may be destroyed by your government. But if you’re a restaurateur who doesn’t want to serve Trump voters, well, hey, you’re just exercising your rights.

This message comes through loud and clear after a Hawaii café recently posted a sign stating, “If you voted for Trump you cannot eat here! No Nazis.”

Read the rest here. 

By Selwyn Duke

CLAIM: “Facebook 'fact checker' who will arbitrate on 'fake news' is accused of defrauding website to pay for prostitutes — and its staff includes an escort-porn star and 'Vice Vixen dome.'”

Although the above is the form used to introduce topics at “fact-checking” website Snopes.com, don’t hold your breath waiting for this particular claim to appear there anytime soon. This isn’t because the quoted sentence, a Daily Mail headline, is true or untrue. It’s because it’s all too revealing about Snopes’ CEO — in a “the emperor has no clothes” kind of way.

Read the rest here.