By Selwyn Duke

The USSR sent 200,000 troops into Hungary in 1956, and the same number into Czechoslovakia in 1968, to crush freedom-oriented movements. In neither case did we consider, even for a moment, dispatching NATO forces to those beleaguered nations to directly confront the Soviets.

Likewise, President Ronald Reagan was a staunch Cold Warrior, had famously dubbed the USSR the “evil empire,” and did covertly arm Afghanistan’s Mujahideen after the 1979 Soviet invasion of their land. Nonetheless, the prospect of having Western troops directly fight the USSR’s forces was inconceivable with the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over everyone’s head. It was a line you just didn’t cross.

Until now.

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By Selwyn Duke

When the film The Passion of the Christ hit theaters in 2004, critics began wringing their hands (and the Truth) and claimed the work would stoke anti-semitism. In reality, an analysis found that viewers emerged from the movie not more, but less, anti-semitic (and one man was inspired to repent and confess to murder). This really isn’t surprising, either, as it reflects related research: A study of 45,000 youths in Germany, released in 2010, found that increasing religiosity made Christian youths less violent.

Note: This means less violent than today’s secular norm.

Then there’s the secular extreme. This brings us to the recently intensifying left-wing, college-campus hatred of (and violence against) Jews, which, being overt and odious, has shocked and befuddled many. What explains this phenomenon?

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By Selwyn Duke

Perhaps it’s not surprising in an age where people and governments sue gun manufacturers because criminals misuse their well-designed products. But now there’s another example of selective targeting of a lawful industry based on political imperatives:

The Washington Post (WaPo), which has a history of peddling fake news and even had to pay a defamation settlement, is now calling companies that package their products in plastic “polluters.”

This is despite the fact that it is not the companies that sometimes incorrectly dispose of plastic containers, but end users, governments, and other entities.

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By Selwyn Duke

Get woke, become a joke?

That ex-Harvard President Claudine Gay and four other Harvard figures have recently been charged with plagiarism, and that a “dishonesty researcher” at the school has been accused of dishonesty, probably doesn’t surprise Mike Rowe. After all, the award-winning host of shows such as Dirty Jobs and Somebody’s Gotta Do It has witnessed the recent goings-on at American college campuses — and he’s aghast.

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By Selwyn Duke

When Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson claimed she couldn’t define “woman” during her confirmation hearings in 2022, it created quite a stir. The story only would’ve been better if Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who’d asked the then-judicial nominee to define the term, had followed up with, “Are you a woman, Judge Jackson?” The follow-up to that then should’ve been:

“How do you know?”

As Mark Twain noted, however, “A good answer is the one you think of later.” This is also true of good questions.

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By Selwyn Duke

In the past, some German primary schools and daycare centers renamed a traditional Christian festival to avoid “offending” Islamic newcomers. Around the same time, a Protestant German church removed its Christian crosses to accommodate Muslim migrants it was housing. But such concessions won’t be nearly enough to please the “new Germans,” according to a new study. It found, after all, that almost half of young Muslims in Germany prefer Islamic theocracy to constitutional republicanism.

It also discovered that more than a third accept violence used against those who insult Allah or the “prophet” Mohamed.

This isn’t anything new — nor is it confined to Germany. Interviews conducted in “Little Mogadishu” in Minneapolis in 2015 revealed that many respondents believed Sharia law should be preeminent, criticizing Mohamed should be criminalized, and using violence against those slandering him is legitimate.

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By Selwyn Duke

When Hiroo Onoda, the last Japanese soldier to surrender after WWII, saw pamphlets dropped by the United States stating the war was over, he thought it was a trick by the enemy and continued fighting, hiding, and killing in the Philippine jungle — for 29 years. It was only when his wartime commander traveled to his remote location in 1974 and ordered Onoda to lay down his arms that he gave up the battle and returned to Japan.

If only the “transgender” cultists were so reasonable.

While their cause was never more noble than Imperial Japan’s, their die-hards fight on, even in the face of yet another scientific report — this one issued by a leading pediatrician — stating that giving children SDTs (Sexual Distortion Treatments, e.g., puberty blockers) is unwise and dangerous.

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By Selwyn Duke

We heard it with the female tennis players. We heard it with our women’s national soccer team (even though they’d lost to 14-year-old boys). Now we hear it with lady basketball sensation Caitlin Clark.

“Look at how much the male players receive,” is the complaint. “She’s not getting the money she deserves!” This is true, too.

Clark is perhaps getting more than she deserves.

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By Selwyn Duke

“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.” This truth was expressed by G.K. Chesterton in the Illustrated London News in 1909 — and was illustrated perfectly by comedian-cum-commentator Bill Maher just the other night.

Friday’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher went viral owing to a much applauded “Kid ‘N Prey” monologue he delivered on pedophilia, but later comments on prenatal infanticide (abortion) were equally eyebrow-raising. In fact and quite ironically, after insisting while discussing child sex abuse that it’s “every adult’s job to protect [children],” Maher would essentially say that this obligation didn’t extend to children inside the womb. Oh, and “children” they are, he tacitly admitted. To wit:

While honorably defending pro-lifers against propagandistic charges that they “hate women,” the commentator said that the real issue with prenatal infanticide is that “they think it’s murder.”

“And it kind of is,” Maher then confessed, before adding, “I’m just okay with that — I am.”

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By Selwyn Duke

It was generations ago that C.S. Lewis warned of “omnipotent moral busybodies … who torment us for our own good.” Such people are more dangerous than robber barons, he explained, because they “will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.” Enter Lindsey Smith Taillie, “nutrition epidemiologist,” associate professor at the Gillings School of Global Public Health — and candidate for the current Moral Busybody of the Week award.

Most everyone has a passion that in certain cases can become obsession. Some people collect stamps. Others exercise compulsively. And there are men who turn their wives into golf widows. Taillie’s obsession is controlling what we eat and lobbying for government regulations to that end.

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