The Bible and the Schools

 

Irony of ironies. There was an attempt to ban the Bible from school libraries in a conservative state because of a law against risqué content in school books. 

The Mirror out of the UK reports: “A Texas school district has reportedly been forced to remove copies of the Bible after a new state law banned books that were ‘sexually explicit.’ It was revealed in an email from Canyon Independent School District Superintendent Darryl Flusche, that the holy book had been deemed unsuitable due to ‘sexually explicit material.’"

It clearly appears that school officials are trying to play “gotcha” with opponents of sexually explicit schoolbooks. The Mirror added, “Several parents were reportedly furious with the news. During a school board meeting earlier [in December 2024], Canyon ISD parent Regina Kiehne told school officials it ‘seems absurd to me that the Good Book was thrown out with the bad books.’"

The blowback was so strong, school officials retreated from their guileful position in the face of widespread opposition. 

I’m glad to hear that some of the school districts in Texas allow the Bible on school property at all. But it’s a shame that ever since the Supreme Court ruled in the Abington v. Schempp case of 1963, many school districts have banned the Good Book altogether from the schools (while at the same time often allowing all manner of LGBTQ pornography).

In Schempp, the court declared as unconstitutional use of the Bible for devotional purposes in the classroom. But they added that the Bible has its place in a well-rounded education.

Said the majority of the justices: “It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.”

For decades, many public school systems have systematically gone way beyond what the Supreme Court decided. Personally I think many of those Supreme Court decisions, such as Schempp, were wrongly decided. They grew out of a bias in favor of secularism and opposed to religion. Frankly, this country was founded by Christians for religious freedom, which they generously offered to other groups. 

The irony of the Bible being controversial in the schools is that this is the book that helped create the educational system in America.

When you trace back education in our country, you see the Bible was the chief motivating factor. It was so that people could read the Bible for themselves that schools were started in the first place. 

The first law regarding education in America is nicknamed “the Old Deluder Satan Act.” The Puritans, the founders of Boston, wanted their children to learn how to read so they could read the Scriptures for themselves.

The act explicitly states that this was a counter-measure against the devil, who wants people to remain ignorant of the Word of God.

This 1647 Act states: “It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures…and that Learning may not be buried in the graves of our fore-fathers in Church and Commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavors: it is therefore ordered… [that every township] shall then forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read.”

The children even learned their ABCs with Bible lessons. The widely used New England Primer taught: “A-In Adam’s fall, we sinned all. B-thy life to mend, the Bible tend. C-Christ crucified, for sinners died.” 

The original colleges and universities were started to train ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Harvard’s original motto (in Latin) was “Truth for Christ and the Church.” The first president of Princeton, Rev, Jonathan Dickinson, said, “Cursed be all learning contrary to the cross of Christ.” Except for Cornell (founded 200 years after Harvard), all of the Ivy League schools were explicitly Christian.

And on it goes.  

Founding father and Declaration of Independence signer Dr. Benjamin Rush declared, “The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in RELIGION….Without this, there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments. . .. the religion I mean to recommend in this place is the religion of JESUS CHRIST.” [emphasis his]

Dr. Rush also warned of the consequences when schools ignore teaching the Bible: “I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes and take so little pains to prevent them.”

We need more Bible in the schools, including the public schools, not less.

Selective Force, Strategic Restraint: Unpacking Trump’s Jacksonian Foreign Policy

 

Have you noticed recently that Donald Trump has both issued threats to our existential enemies abroad and that he’s called for peace as well?

In other words, he’s told Hamas: “You better let the hostages go by the time that I’m president or else.”

And yet he’s also said, at the same time, we don’t want these 2,000 Americans in Syria. It’s a mess. The country’s destroyed. Get them out before they get killed.

This brings up kind of a dichotomy that’s been discussed: Is the [Make America Great Again] agenda and Donald Trump in particular isolationist? That’s what the accusation is, that under no circumstances will we slay dragons abroad, looking for them. Or is he a neoconservative, and he wants to intervene everywhere. And I think the answer, of course, is neither.

It was Walter Russell Mead, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, who coined—he didn’t coin it—he rebooted the word “Jacksonian” in reference to Andrew Jackson, the hero of the battle of New Orleans, a [two-term] American president. And what that really means is that America will be second to no one, preeminent military abroad. We will be no better friend to our allies and no worse enemy to our enemies.

More importantly, we don’t have to be perfect to be good abroad. We just act as Americans, and if we’re better than the alternative, that’s fine.

How does this boil down, though, to actual policy. After all, Donald Trump at one point was reported to have told [Russian President] Vladimir Putin, “Don’t go into Ukraine or I’m going to look at the Kremlin”—meaning, he might even attack the Kremlin. And now he’s saying, “This is one of our endless wars and we want to get out of it.”

So how do you square that circle of restoring deterrence lost during the Biden administration and yet not getting bogged down in nation-building and ground wars in the Middle East? And I think the answer is partly to be found in his first term.

Remember what he did? During the Cold War of some 75 years, we didn’t really ever kill Russian soldiers. We may have, as pilots, as Russian pilots were flying in North Korea or Vietnam, but not knowingly and deliberately. Yet, when the Wagner group, some 500 soldiers strong, swarmed an American installation in Syria, they were devastated by U.S. airpower.

He did kill [Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi], the creator of ISIS. He killed Qassem Soleimani—the greatest Iranian terrorist, Gen. Soleimani—in the Middle East that was the architect of supplying weapons to Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

And he also put a maximum pressure policy against Iran. But, but, he did not get in a war, even when he threatened North Korea.

So, what is the MAGA approach to foreign policy? It’s Jacksonianism. He’s a Jacksonian … that is, he builds up the military to ensure that it can deter anybody, but he does it not to use it, but to not use it.

Unfortunately, he’s inherited a world that has lost U.S. deterrence after the Kabul [Afghanistan] fiasco, the greatest military humiliation … in American history, but surely in the last 50 years since we had helicopters flying off the [U.S.] Embassy in Saigon in 1975.

Then we had the Middle East fiasco, where some days we supported Israel; some days we didn’t. Some days we said that Hamas, we can negotiate, some days we didn’t, we wanted to get back in the Iran deal. It was a complete mess, complete mess.

So, when Donald Trump takes office on Jan. 20, he is going to have to restore deterrence to make a calmer world. But he can’t get in an endless bogged-down war. So, he has to be very careful, because that is one of the keystone premises of the Make America Great Again movement.

We do not want another Afghanistan, two decades. We do not want 10 years in Iraq. We do not want to create chaos in Libya. We don’t want to be in the tribal infighting in Syria. But we want the world at peace. And so, I think, what we should look for is that, at particular places, at particular times, when the use of force favors the United States; that is, without getting in house-to-house fighting or terrorism, tit for tat, in the streets of Baghdad … type of endless engagements, we will use overwhelming force to send a signal that we can destroy you without having to fight your type of war on your ground.

And I don’t think you’ll have to do very much of it to restore U.S. calm and deterrence. And it will not be neoconservative interventionism, and it won’t be isolationism. It will be Donald Trump-MAGA Jacksonianism. Thank you.

California Inferno Was ‘Preventable.’ Blame Malfeasance of Newsom, Bass for Catastrophe.

 

As I’m speaking on a Wednesday night, there have been 15,000 acres, 1,000 structures destroyed. Nobody knows how many people are killed or missing. And how do we characterize this? Everybody’s talking about the Santa Ana winds, climate change—I mean everybody, the people in power.

But it was preventable. And once it started, this fire, it could have been assuaged. You could have had it lessened, that the severity didn’t have to be as catastrophic. So, I would characterize it as a DEI–Green New Deal hydrogen bomb. It’s something out of “Dante’s Inferno.”

And what I mean by that is, it’s a systems breakdown, a civilizational collapse. When you look at the people in charge, [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom flew in, to sort of do these performance-art stunts, but he has systematically ensured that water out of the Sacramento River and the watershed of Northern California would go out to the sea, rather than into the aqueduct, so Los Angeles didn’t have sufficient amounts of water.

He bragged not very long ago that he blew up four dams on the Klamath River. They provided 80,000 homes with clean hydroelectric power. They offered recreation, flood control, irrigation. He blew them up.

California’s fire management, whether we look at the Paradise Fire or the Aspen Fire near where I’m speaking, it destroyed 60 million trees. We have no timber industry in California. [Newsom’s] dismantled it.

We don’t clean the forest. We don’t let loggers come in and have a viable livelihood by harvesting trees. It’s sort of considered natural to let these things burn or to at least create the conditions in which they will inevitably be burned.

It’s almost as if we don’t like humans. We worry about grubs and worms and birds and the ecosystem.

The second breakdown was the mayor, Karen Bass, was in Africa. You tell me why the mayor of the third-largest city in the United States at fire season, when she had been warned and warned for days on end that the Santa Ana winds were up to 100 miles an hour in the evening, and there was a danger of fire, and she goes off to Africa for the inauguration of the president of Ghana.

With all due respect, Mayor, but who cares? You have an obligation to the 6 million people of greater Los Angeles. And then we have the fire chief. I don’t really care that she’s LGBTQ, I don’t care [about] any of that. All I do care is her emphases. She’s been bragging for the last two years that her goal was to make sure [the Fire Department] was diverse and inclusive.

That can be good if it’s competent. But when you announce that 70% of your hiring will not be meritocratic, but will be based on diversity, equity, inclusion, then you’re not putting the interest of your constituents first.

There were not even enough, there wasn’t enough water pressure in Pacific Palisades. Pacific Palisades is not where I live. It’s one of the wealthiest, most exclusive neighborhoods in the United States. If they don’t have water, then no one’s going to get water, believe me.

There’s not enough insurance. There were famous actors that didn’t have insurance. Why? Because industry is overregulated, it’s fraught with people who make fraudulent claims, and the insurance industry knows that California is hostile to it, but more importantly that it will never clean up its forest or take preventive, time-tried, ancient protocols to lessen the dangers of fire.

And so put it all together, whether it’s a deliberate policy to not store water, not preserve water. Last year was one of the wettest years that we’ve had. We’ve had three out of the last four years have been very wet. We had a huge snowpack. We had rivers that were running in 19th-century fashion, but out to the sea to save the delta smelt.

So, it was a total systems collapse from the idea of not spending money on irrigation, storage, water, fire prevention, force management, a viable insurance industry, a DEI hierarchy. You put it all together and it’s something like a DEI-Green New Deal hydrogen bomb.

Gavin Newsom was fiddling, as he’s almost Nero Newsom. And this has been something that is just unimaginable, this system’s breakdown.

And to finish, what we’re seeing in California is a state with 40 million people. And yet the people who run it feel that it should return to a 19^th-century pastoral condition. They are decivilizing the state, and deindustrializing the state, and defarming the state, but they’re not telling the 40 million people that their lifestyles will have to revert back to the 19th century when you had no protection from fire, you didn’t have enough water in California, you didn’t have enough power, you didn’t pump oil.

So, we are deliberately making these decisions not to develop energy, not to develop a timber industry, not to protect the insurance industry, not to protect houses and property.

And we’re doing it in almost a purely nihilistic fashion. And Karen Bass should resign. She came to the airport, back from Africa. She had nothing to say. She was confronted at the airport: “Why were you in Africa? Why did you cut the fire department?”

They cut the fire department by almost $18 million. They gave fire protective equipment to Ukraine’s first responders, and she had nothing to say. She had nothing to say because she couldn’t say anything.

I don’t want to be too pessimistic or bleak tonight, but this is one of the most alarming symptoms of a society gone mad, and if this continues, and if this were to spread to other states, we would become a Third World country if we’re not in parts already.

America and Europe Can Hang Together—or Hang Separately

 Consider these European and American binaries.

On Dec. 20, a terrorist, Taleb Al-Abdul Mohsen, rammed his SUV into a Christmas crowd in Magdeburg, Germany. He killed six pedestrians and injured 299 others.

Eleven days later, on New Year’s Eve in New Orleans, Louisiana, Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar smashed his pickup into a festive crowd. He killed 15 and hurt more than 35.


Germany’s fertility rate is scarcely above 1.4—about average for a shrinking European Union. About 20% of the country is now foreign-born, a record high.

American fertility has precipitously dived to 1.6. The foreign-born now represent 15% of the American resident population, the highest in both actual numbers (50 million) and percentages in history.

The German military is a shell of its former self, with fewer than 200,000 soldiers and a shortage of almost all types of weapons.

The U.S. military, after being humiliated in Afghanistan, is currently down some 40,000-plus recruits. It faces shortages of antitank weapons, artillery shells, ships, and logistic support.

Germany may finally manage to spend 2% of its gross domestic product on defense. The United States is heading downward below 3%—the lowest in more than 80 years since the Great Depression.

Last year, the German economy shrank. This year, it will scarcely grow, in part because of shortages of affordable fossil fuels.

Germans pay four times what Americans on average do for electricity. Yet the Trump administration has promised an oil and natural gas renaissance, hoping to expand both production and exports with envisioned new pipelines and liquefied natural gas terminals.

In sum, the U.S. is beginning to mimic the pathologies of Europe—and yet in the next four years, renewal could help slow the decline of both.

Both face shrinking and aging populations. Both either cannot or will not control their borders, despite popular protests. Both suffer from woke political correctness and are pushing back.

The proverbial people of both nations want smaller government—and more freedom of expression and less woke. They insist on less and legal-only immigration and secure borders.

They vote for cheaper energy and fewer regulations.

Europeans and Americans alike want more meritocracy and fewer fixations on race and gender.

In the chaos of the postmodern 21st century, Europe and the U.S. nevertheless are still likely to share the same enemies and friends.

Both resent the asymmetrical Chinese approach to global commerce, based on a mercantilism that would never allow Europe and the United States to treat China as it does both.

The Europeans and the Americans are both worried about a vastly expanding conventional and nuclear Chinese military.

Neither wants Iran to develop nuclear-tipped missiles with ranges to hit the capitals of both. They do not want Russian President Vladimir Putin to re-create the former Soviet Union’s borders.

Europe, as a rule, loves Democrats as kindred quasi-socialists. But privately, many Europeans assume their own security and prosperity do better when America is governed by conservatives.

In the past, Europe has not been a fan of Donald Trump, both as president and as a pre- and post-presidency candidate.

They fear that he is an isolationist, insufficiently diplomatic, not fully supportive of NATO, or too tariff-happy for their tastes—and are scared of his art-of-the-deal trolling to prompt wake-up calls.

But 2025 is certainly not 2017 or even 2020. And a “reset” in thinking on both sides is urgently needed, now more than ever.

The Biden administration was no model partner for Europe. It quite outrageously forced cancellations of a joint Cypriot, Greek, and Israeli EastMed pipeline to bring much-needed natural gas to Europe.

It talked a great game about strengthening NATO. But the alliance’s bulwark, the U.S. military, saw its real budget cut, its Pentagon politicized, and recruitment short more than 40,000 enlistees.

The humiliating 2021 skedaddle from Afghanistan not only eroded American credibility, but undermined all Western deterrence as well.

President Joe Biden opposed building new liquefied natural gas export terminals in the U.S. designed to help energy-starved Europe find a reliable and honest supplier and decouple from Russia.

Trump, in contrast, promises to “drill, drill, drill,” in part to ensure needed income by exporting huge amounts of LNG to fuel-starved Europe.

Europe was angry that a bantering Trump once bullied it to meet its promises to increase its defense spending. But after the invasion of Ukraine, it is happy that some countries did just that.

Europeans likely want—and need—Trump to restore a more deterrent U.S. military, not a woke one.

Europe and America are both in crisis and need radical new thinking.

So, who knows: Europe may soon quietly rejoice that Biden is gone, Trump is back, and they have a strong, loyal, and rowdy friend, rather than a simpering enabler.

Deport Millions, Finish the Wall, Tax Remittances, and End Birthright Citizenship

I want to talk about illegal immigration. You know, this is the point in our history that we’ve never been before. We have not a porous border, but no border at all. We’ve had somewhere between 10 [million] to 12 million illegal entrants since the Biden administration began.

There is no real corpus of immigration law. It’s been destroyed. We’re at a historical period in our country, where 55 million people, never such a large number of people born outside the United States, that are residing here. In terms of percentages, almost 16% of the population was not born in the United States.


That’s an enormous task of assimilation, integration, [and] civic education, and we just haven’t been doing any of that. So, what are we going to do? Well, the first thing is: We need to stop “catch and release.” We need to make entrants, legal entrants, go back to their country if they’re applying for refugee status. You cannot come here, and then say you’re a refugee. You must ascertain that and prove that at the consulate overseas.  

We’ve got to finish the walls. It’s a 2,000-mile border, and we’ve never quite been able to continue. We’ve got a wall or fence or somehow obstruct the entire 2,000-mile border. That will save manpower. It will save time and cost, and it will have an enormous deterrent effect.

The next couple of things are a little bit trickier. I think that whatever your status is, if you are sending money back to a foreign country from the United States that is singled out as a source of illegal immigration—Mexico, Latin America, for example—then the United States government should put a 10% to 20% or 30% tax on all the remittances.

That would earn us up to maybe somewhere around $20 billion. And that would also deter Mexico, to take one example, that depends on remittances as its largest source of foreign exchange—greater than tourism, greater than its oil revenues. And yet, so often the American taxpayer—state, local, federal—through generous subsidies, free up the cash so that the illegal resident can send it back for social necessities that the Mexican government itself is responsible for, so we’re subsidizing everybody but ourselves.  

I think it’s very important that we start looking at the countries that are the source of illegal immigration in terms of security. A Sudan, a Syria, terrorist countries that support, countries that support terrorism like Venezuela, the Middle East, especially Iran. Russia, as well.

Why would we let them send people here that we have no background checks, have not adjudicated their status? So, we should have a travel ban, an immediate deportation, and immediate consequences for the mother country that knowingly sends these people here. And that, too, would be a deterrent.  

We’ve got to also look at anchor babies.

The 14th Amendment didn’t really ever say, as sometimes [is] alleged, that if you’re born in the United States, then you’re an automatic citizen. It says if you’re born in the United States, and not subject to the laws of another country. All the people coming, in some sense, are subject to the laws of another country.

So, we have to redefine that, either through legislation or renewed attempts in the courts.  

Europe, the Left always looks for guidance—17 [European] countries don’t even allow it. And the other 13 or 14 have restrictions that qualify it. So, we’re the only country in the world that gives unqualified citizenship to people who happen to be born here and then anchor an entire family.  

Why not also put a 10-, 20-year ban on people who have been detained here illegally and stop them from applying for a green card or legal readmissions for 20 years? That would be a very powerful deterrent.  

In other words, we would announce sometime in February and say, “We want all of you to know, all 12 million who came here during the Biden administration, to take the first iteration of cohort, you have 30 days to go back. If you do not go back to your country, and you are detained, arrested here in the United States, you will be deported, but you will not be given any chance to get a green card for 10 to 20 years,” depending on how the courts or legislation adjudicates it.

And finally, I think it’s time to look at how we deport people. The first 500,000 who have committed a crime, it will be no problem. There’s unanimous consent. They should be deported immediately. They’re wreaking havoc on the American population.  

The next iteration, the 1.5 [million], 1.7 million people who have already gone through the system, they’ve been adjudicated, they failed to show up for the court hearings. Or they left detention when they were facing deportation.  

Those would be the next group that would face deportation. The third group of people, as I said earlier, from terrorist countries or terrorist-supporting countries, no one is going to sympathize with their residents here.

The fourth group is a little trickier, but I think we could pretty easily find hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of able-bodied residents who are on public assistance and who have not been here five years. If you haven’t been here five years, you came during the Biden open-borders era.

You were on welfare of some sort, and you’re able to work. You should go back home. That would leave a large group of people who have been here five years. They’ve never committed a crime. They’re not on public assistance. And they want to get a green card, not citizenship, a green card.  

I think if we had won public opinion and support by deporting the most egregious offenders, say 10 [million] to 12 million, then I think in a bipartisan fashion, we could work out a system for the law-abiding, the productive, and the long-residing American residents and allow them to pay a fine to recapture legality and stay in the United States.  

It’s going to be a tough road to restore border security, because the prior administration didn’t believe in it. But I think now that the White House, the Senate, and the House are in Republican hands, it’s absolutely possible. It can be done rather quickly.