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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By Selwyn Duke

“A man capable of deceiving only others,” instructs a sage old saying, “is not as dangerous as a man capable of deceiving himself.” Bringing this to mind are comments Democrat-turned-independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. made recently, talking about an interaction he had with CNN news anchor Erin Burnett two weeks ago.

Kennedy described how Burnett was genuinely shocked when, responding to a question she asked about how President Trump allegedly imperils the Republic, he told her that Joe Biden actually poses the greater threat.

“I can make an argument that President Biden is even more dangerous to the Republic,” he related on The Rubin Report last week. “And she had this kind of astonished look — where, you know, her brain stopped working.”

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By Selwyn Duke

Here we go again. We heard leftists trumpet the “browning of America” (see MSNBC et al.) via Third World immigration. We also heard them, contradictorily, complain about the “whitewashing” of San Francisco’s Mission District neighborhood when Caucasian dot-commers moved in. Now we’re told that New York City’s famed Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is also guilty of EBW.

(That would be “Existing Based on Whiteness.”)

This was used, too, as a pretext last summer for canceling its “‘Mostly Mozart’ festival in favor of more ‘inclusive’ fare,” writes the New York Post’s James Panero— “sponsoring rappers, pop groups and an LGBTQ mariachi band while hanging a 10-foot-wide disco ball above its fountain.”

My, how enticing. Just makes you want to get some tickets and brave NYC’s criminals, vagrants, and other assorted ne’er-do-wells to be culturally enriched.

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By Selwyn Duke

“Bring the salmon home. Remove the Klamath dams,” read a banner protesters displayed in California years ago. Now the dams have been removed — and, as a result, approximately 830,000 juvenile salmon were damned to death (trout were killed, too). This was unforeseen by the greentopian dam destroyers, and Golden State Governor Gavin Newsom, who backed the project, now wants federal disaster aid and economic assistance.

Oh, this doesn’t mean Newsom’s administration is taking any responsibility. Instead, its officials are blaming, in part, wait for it … climate change!

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By Selwyn Duke

The last Friday of the Muslim religious-observance month Ramadan is pro-Palestinian “International Quds Day.” Born of the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and declared by then-Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Khomeini, it has been held annually for 45 years now and is marked by rallies in protest of “usurper Israel.” That’s what Khomeini called the Jewish state, in his Al-Quds Day declaration, which he concluded with, “I ask God Almighty for the victory of the Muslims over the infidels.”

So perhaps it’s not surprising that this event has long been attended by chants of “Death to Israel” and “Death to America.” But here’s what is new:

On this past Quds Day, on April 5, were heard “death to America” chants in America.

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By Selwyn Duke

A demon, once released, is an uncontrollable beast. That one should therefore be careful when opening a gate to Hades is a lesson many have learned, the hard way. The latest example is one Erwin Chemerinsky, “Distinguished Professor of Law” at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

Chemerinsky just got schooled in the law of the jungle — in this case, to be precise, in the law of left-wing revolutions. You see, the professor “is an old-school 1960s leftist radical. He’s also Jewish,” writes commentator Andrea Widburg. “This week, he learned the tried-and-true lesson of all revolutions: The younger generation is more radicalized and will inevitably turn on its revolutionary progenitors. Thus, Chemerinsky, who is now the Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law, was shocked to have his law students scarily and aggressively turn against him for being a ‘Zionist.’”

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By Selwyn Duke

We’ve already heard the suggestion that black Americans’ votes should be worth twice those of their white countrymen as a form of reparations. We’ve also heard an economist estimate that providing full monetary reparations to blacks would cost approximately $14 trillion. Now there’s another brilliant reparations idea, one related by a black congresswoman:

Blacks could be exempt from paying taxes to compensate them for slavery.

The politician, freshman representative Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), did have one practical objection to the proposal, however:

Many struggling black Americans already don’t pay taxes, Crockett said — so it may be better to just hand those people checks.

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By Selwyn Duke

“Most people think the U.S. crime rate is rising. They’re wrong,” proclaimed an NBC headline this past December. Citing “new FBI data,” the outlet was essentially telling Americans that they shouldn’t believe their lyin’ eyes. But, it turns out, it’s the data themselves that may be deceptive.

This is the conclusion of the Coalition for Law Order & Safety, an independent group of law enforcement officials and analysts. In their April 2024 report, “Assessing America’s Crime Crisis: Trends, Causes, and Consequences,” they identify “four potential causes for the increase in crime in most major cities across the U.S.: de-policing, de-carceration, de-prosecution and politicization of the criminal justice system,” related Fox News Monday.

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By Selwyn Duke

Many years ago, I read a quite rational atheist commenter online who said that while he didn’t believe in God, he feared what a de-Christianized West would bring. Now, a couple of decades later, he’s perhaps joined in that sentiment by the man who’s probably the world’s most famous living atheist, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.

On British talk-radio station LBC recently, Dawkins admitted that he enjoys living in a Christian society and considers himself a “cultural Christian.” While this isn’t exactly a road-to-Damascus moment, it’s nonetheless quite an admission from a once staunchly militant atheist most famous for writing the 2006 book The God Delusion.

Yet Dawkins now exhibits the have-your-cultural-cake-and-eat-it-too delusion. His contradiction, however, is many people’s — and his story holds a lesson we ignore at our peril.

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By Selwyn Duke

Famed general Hannibal Barca set out to invade his day’s greatest European power, Rome, with 37 elephants. Today, 2,200 years later, Botswana is making him look like a piker, floating the idea of sending 20,000 pachyderms to our time’s greatest European economic power, Germany. And though this is a war of words and not swords, it’s an interesting story that teaches an important economics/conservation lesson.

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