How the Left Keeps Me Religious

Its lies and corruption awakened me to the centrality of religion.

By DENNIS PRAGER

Nothing keeps me religious more than the Left, not even religion itself. I am not even particularly “spiritual.” My religiosity is overwhelmingly rational (the title of my Bible commentary is “The Rational Bible”). I believe in God because creation rationally suggests a Creator.

The force that has most propelled me to religion is the great (secular) religion of the last hundred years: the Left. If most people of the Left (the Left, not liberalism) — people who have not only rejected but scorned God, Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible — were decent individuals, were committed to intellectual honesty, and had produced some great art and works of wisdom, then leftism would have constituted a serious challenge to my religious beliefs.

But the very opposite is the case. While liberals have done some good, everything the Left has touched it has ruined. The most obvious example is universities. As Harvard professor Steven Pinker, a liberal and an atheist, put it, the Left has rendered the universities a “laughingstock.”

The most godless, religion-free, and Bible-free institution in the West — the university — has become both the stupidest and most morally corrupt institution in the West. That is what first awakened me to the indispensability of God, religion, and the Bible. I first wrote about it some 25 years ago (“How I found God at Columbia”).

Our universities, because of the Left, are intellectually and morally sick. And if that is not a result of their antipathy to the Bible, its God and Judeo-Christian thought, then what is it the result of?

Let’s begin with the moral. The Left and the universities teach gullible young students lies, immoral ideas, and foolish doctrines. At almost any university in the English-speaking world, the United States — arguably the most decent large society in history — is depicted as a vile society, founded by bigots who engaged in genocidal evil, sustained by racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and greed. Its wars are depicted as racist and imperialist. Students are taught that it is a racist “microaggression” to say that “there is only one race: the human race” or “America is a land of opportunity” or “I try to treat everyone the same.”

At universities, minority students are taught that they are hated by all white Americans — perhaps the greatest libel since the medieval blood libel that charged Jews with killing Christian children to use their blood for Passover matzos.

The universities teach that in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, it is humane, democratic, liberal Israel that is the villain, not the totalitarian, genocidal theocrats of Hamas. I debated this very issue at Oxford University, where my opponents, two left-wing academics, argued that between Israel and Hamas, Israel was the greater threat to Middle East peace.

The godless Left and universities teach that there’s no male and female in the human species, that these terms are mere “social constructs.” A few weeks ago, two trans females came in first and second place in a Connecticut high-school track race for girls. These runners won solely because they were biological males. Yet, not only they were allowed to race against females, but they also set new records in Connecticut girls’ track. Anyone who complained that this was unfair — which to every non-leftist it was — was attacked by the Left as a “hater.” A writer for The Nation defended the male bodies that won the races because, in his moronic words, “trans women are in fact women” (italics added). As I showed in my last column, truth has never been a left-wing value.

Moreover, I could not find one “feminist” organization that defended the girl runners of Connecticut. Feminism is no more interested in protecting women than Communism was in protecting workers.

The Left is also the Western home of contemporary anti-Semitism. There are individual anti-Semites across the political spectrum, but the incubator of modern anti-Semitism is the Left. Thanks to leftists such as Jeremy Corbyn, the head of the British Labour Party, and the two new female Muslim members of the U.S. Congress, anti-Semitism is becoming respectable in the West for the first time since the Holocaust. The Left has rendered “Zionism,” the oldest national movement in history — the 2,000-year-old Jewish aspiration to return to Israel — a term of opprobrium. While many individuals continue to support Zionism, the one non-Jewish group to continue to defend it is the evangelical Christian community.

As I show in my commentary on Genesis, what the first book of the Bible depicts is not only God’s creation of the world but, equally important, God’s shaping primordial chaos (Genesis 1:2) into order. The divine order consists of distinctions; prominent examples include man and God, man and animal, male and female, good and evil, holy and profane, parent and child. The Left is a war against order; in its essence, leftism creates chaos. It has worked to destroy all those biblical distinctions. The present giveaway is the nihilist project of the Left to erase the male-female distinction, the only innate human distinction God cares about: “God created mankind in his own image . . . male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). “He created them male and female and blessed them” (Genesis 5:2). No ethnic or racial distinction matters in Genesis, only the male-female distinction.

The God-centered West produced Bach and Michelangelo. The Left, which dominates music and art, has produced mostly junk; there is nothing higher to aspire to, as excellence is not a left-wing value and the Left uses art to shock, not inspire. Hence the huge amount of scatological art, for example.

Belief in God and the Bible were instrumental to the creation of America — the last, best hope of mankind. The rejection of that God and that Bible is instrumental to wrecking America (and the rest of the West). That alone tells me how important that God and that Bible are. The Left knows it, too.

SOURCE 

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The Russiagate hoax has made the world a more dangerous place by undermining President Trump’s ability to defuse North Korea, China and Russia

Thanks to the Russiagate hoax that sought to falsely frame President Donald Trump as being a Russian agent when he wasn’t, the world has undeniably become a more dangerous place, as America’s partners overseas have had to contend with the real possibility that Trump would be removed from office.

As it turns out, President Trump is not going anywhere, with Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluding the Justice Department’s three-year investigation, quoted in Attorney General William Barr’s letter to Congress: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”

But what deals overseas were lost because of the specter of the investigation?

A recent example came last month when President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s summit in Hanoi, Vietnam abruptly ended without a deal on denuclearization. Democrats on Capitol Hill had cynically arranged for former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen to testify before the House Oversight Committee against his former boss the same day, which dominated news headlines while the summit was ongoing.

It didn’t matter that Cohen ultimately offered testimony that was exculpatory for Trump — he had never been to Prague in 2016 to meet Russian agents as had been alleged and Trump never directed him to change his testimony to Congress on a potential real estate deal in Russia — the damage may have already been done.

On March 3, Trump took to Twitter to blast the outcome, stating, “For the Democrats to interview in open hearings a convicted liar & fraudster, at the same time as the very important Nuclear Summit with North Korea, is perhaps a new low in American politics and may have contributed to the ‘walk.’ Never done when a president is overseas. Shame!”

Elsewhere, the ongoing investigation into Trump — which turns out was a dead-end with the no-collusion finding — may have been hampering U.S.-China trade talks, too. After the Mueller report was released, financial analysts brightened their outlook on a potential U.S.-China trade deal, CNBC reported in a March 25 story, “Mueller report fuels hopes for a US-China trade deal.”

“The Mueller report isn’t a game changer, but it should encourage China to keep up recent momentum in trying to finalize a deal with Trump… [T]he fact that an impeachment looks less likely will be meaningful for Beijing’s calculus,” Eurasia Group Asia director Michael Hirson told CNBC.

Similarly, The Economist Intelligence Unit Asia regional director Duncan Innes-Ker told CNBC, “The fact there wasn’t any smoking gun, indictment of Trump or Trump family members, puts the administration in a better position to fight for the 2020 election — and that has implications for the trade talks.”

The opposite line there is that while there was still the possibility of Trump being prosecuted or impeached, China felt it should just wait Trump out. Why make any concessions to a president who was about to be removed?

Now world leaders have to contend with the likelihood that Trump will be reelected in 2020.

While the trade talks directly impact China’s economic relationship with the U.S., they also impact how the two superpowers are going to interact going forward. This leads to the question, that if U.S. and Chinese differences on trade cannot be resolved diplomatically now, how will they be resolved later?

The same can be said of U.S.-Russian relations in the aftermath of the 2016 election campaign, where Russia was simultaneously accused of interfering with the election on behalf of Trump by hacking the DNC and John Podesta emails and putting them on Wikileaks and cultivating him as a Russian agent to serve in the White House.

Both sets of allegations led to intelligence agency and Justice Department investigations and were eventually under Mueller’s umbrella. During that time, tensions have absolutely mounted between the U.S. and Russia on nuclear weapons and hotspots like Syria and Ukraine and made the possibility of armed conflict more likely.

One year ago, U.S.-led forces in Syria were attacked by Russian soldiers, where more than 100 Russians were killed in the battle. Fortunately, both sides agreed publicly that the incident was not officially sanctioned by Russia, in what Bloomberg View’s Eli Lake calling it akin to Plato’s “noble lie,” an effort to prevent a wider escalation of tensions between the two superpowers.

The 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty has been abandoned by Washington, D.C. and Moscow, as both the U.S. and Russia have contended each side was in violation of the treaty with the development of ground-based missile systems banned by the treaty. The INF Treaty was the first ever nuclear arms reduction treaty in the nuclear age. It laid the groundwork for the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). Both of those in turn built off of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties of the 1970s and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (1970). New START, signed in 2011 and expiring in 2021, could be the next to fall in the wake of the Russia hysteria.

We’re in a new nuclear arms race.

More recently, Russia has just put troops in Venezuela to assist the beleaguered Maduro government and to create a deterrent against potential U.S. intervention there.

All the while, the overwhelming perception has remained that Russia intervened in the 2016 elections.

Disputes over Russia’s annexation of Crimea also remain at the forefront as Ukraine remains a potential hotspot that could draw the U.S. into conflict.

Last summer’s Helsinki summit between Trump and Putin might have been an opportunity to deescalate these tensions and shore up the nuclear security agreements. But that didn’t happen and it is hard not to point to the Russiagate allegations against Trump as having hampered those efforts.

In short, the red phone line has been cut.

Even today, despite the Mueller report’s findings of no collusion, doing a deal would not be easy for Trump, even if coming to an agreement might salvage or strengthen nuclear arms control agreements and benefit humanity by curbing an existential threat.

The problem is in 2016, Trump ran on trying to deescalate the relationship with Russia, and the U.S. national security apparatus launched the Russiagate investigation on him in response, kneecapping the entire presidency in the process.

Now, with Democrats unable to acknowledge the no-collusion finding, any potential agreement remains under a cloud of warrantless suspicion.

U.S. presidents all the way back to Franklin Roosevelt have always been able to talk directly with Moscow without the specter of such an investigation. Yet despite everything that has happened, it is still up to President Trump to attempt to repair the relationship, defuse these hotspots and salvage what remains of nuclear arms control agreements. We need to get back on the same page — for everyone’s sake.

SOURCE 

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What Iceland Can Teach America about Debt Reduction

Debt reduction is possible. Indeed, there can be huge reductions in a very short period of time.

Iceland is a tiny little country with just 338,000 people (about the population of Santa Ana, CA), but that doesn’t mean it can’t teach us lessons about public policy.

I wrote about the nation’s approach to fisheries in 2016 and explained that the property rights-based system is the best way of protecting fish stocks from over-harvesting.

And in 2013, I wrote about how modest spending restraint was helping to solve fiscal problems created by the financial crisis.

Today, I want to further explore Iceland’s fiscal policy, largely because of this remarkable chart that accompanied a Bloomberg report on the country’s budget strategy.

As you can see, debt skyrocketed during the financial crisis and has since plummeted at a very rapid rate.



This shows debt reduction is possible. Indeed, there can be huge reductions in a very short period of time.

So there may be hope for nations that are in the midst of fiscal crisis (such as Greece), nations that are about to suffer fiscal crisis (Italy is a prime candidate), and nations that will suffer a crisis if there isn’t reform (most developed nations, including the United States).

But what are the specific policy lessons?

Here are some excerpts from the accompanying article, which basically tells us that the government is focused on spending restraint.

Iceland will continue to reduce public debt and sustain a budget surplus even as it lowers taxes in the next five years, Finance Minister Bjarni Benediktsson said. The plan is part of a financial road map… The balancing act between austerity and the proposed fiscal concessions means less room for the government to…step up other spending… “We will need to impose certain measures of restriction,” Benediktsson said. The government may have to seek cost savings of as much as 5 billion kronur ($42 million), he said. …The financial plan projects a decrease in taxes as well as the Treasury’s debt levels and interest burden. It also expects the bank tax to be lowered in four steps.

But the article didn’t tell us why Iceland’s debt fell so quickly.

So I dug into the IMF’s World Economic Outlook database and crunched some numbers. I specifically wanted to find out why debt fell, both before and after the 2008 crisis.

And I focused on three sets of numbers:

Annual inflation rate
Annual growth of government spending burden
Annual increase in nominal gross domestic product

Here are those numbers, both for the years leading up to the 2008 crisis, as well as what happened starting in 2009.



For both the 2001-07 period and 2009-19 period, Iceland followed my Golden Rule. Government spending (the orange bars) grew slower than the economy (the grey bars).

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that debt fell during both eras.

But debt fell much faster starting in 2009 for the simple reason that the gap between spending growth and GDP growth was very significant over the past 10 years. This is the reason for the big reduction in debt.

And this spending restraint also generated some data that’s even more important—the burden of government spending has dropped from more than 48 percent of economic output in 2009 to less than 41 percent of GDP this year.

SOURCE 

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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