THE FOX NEWS FRAT HOUSE

Here’s a conspiracy theory worth pondering.  On Monday, April 6, 2026, Fox News’ premier evening program, The Five, featured not only Dana Perino, Kellyanne Conway, Greg Gutfeld, and Jesse Watters, but also Kat Timpf in the chair typically occupied by Harold Ford or Jessica Tarlov.  The conspiracy?  Someone has been transforming the news organization into an unserious, morally vacuous source for information and opinion.  Maybe it’s the former House Speaker and Mitt Romney’s 2012 running mate, Paul Ryan, who continues to sit on the board of Fox Corporation.  Or maybe it’s Karl Rove, the Bush 43 whiteboard guru.  Or maybe it’s some other Deep State figure who has penetrated the bowels of Fox News.  But some cabal must be afoot to populate the network’s programs with contributors or hosts that stand slightly above late night comics when it comes to credible analysis.     

The plot began three years ago when Jesse Watters, formerly Bill O’Reilly’s “Man on the Street,” was elevated to the 8 p.m. (ET) anchor spot replacing Tucker Carlson.  While Watters occasionally strings together salient talking points, on a gravitas scale he rates near Pee-wee Herman.  To his credit (if not his credibility) Watters regularly observes that his prestigious journalistic position was a stroke of luck, not a status achieved through professional merit.  On Watters’ Primetime show he chums it up with folks like “K-Mac” (Kevin McCarthy) and “VDH” (Victor Davis Hanson) during interviews where serious issues are approached on his part like exchanges between frat house buddies.  This insouciance turns into Gutfeld-inspired frivolity and stupidity on The Five where, in the aforementioned episode, he turned a question about Democrats touting tax cuts into an analogy involving a return to the missionary position after experimenting with various sexual alternatives. 

Gutfeld is a different matter given the fact that he regularly composes poignant diatribes eviscerating leftist absurdities.  The problem is that his not-so-late-night obscenity fest (7 p.m. on the West Coast) totally destroys his credibility as a serious individual whose opinions are worthy of consideration.  On Gutfeld! his psychological instability and moral vacuity are clearly displayed.  Compulsive sniggering, a scatological fixation, plus jokes that completely discard the notion of taste reveal that Gutfeld is “a sick man,” as Paul Mauro recently observed when countering the host’s ecstatic praise for an erotic chatbot.  While “late night” Gutfeld generally tows a pro-MAGA political line, his comic persona is that of a rank degenerate.  (No, Greg, it isn’t funny that you have some young pool-boys confined in your basement.)  Indeed, Gutfeld’s comic “brand” is that nothing is sacred, a shtick that completely obviates his serious monologue about Democrats destroying the boundaries a society requires.  Finally, Gutfeld’s comic (and at least partially real) personality has lowered the intellectual and moral tone of The Five, especially in terms of acceptable language and imagery (cf. the aforementioned Watters analogy).  

Kat Timpf’s addition to The Five on April 6 was the coup de grâce for that episode’s integrity.  Timpf, who infiltrated FOX via Gutfeld’s late-late night program, Red Eye, brought to the highly rated evening show Gutfeld’s personal moral void plus none of his political insights.  Though careful to mute her freshman level  “libertarian” views about borders, drag queens, and drug and prostitution legalization that air on Gutfeld!, when given a chance to speak on this more serious program, Timpf was still able to plug her idea that no joke is off limits -- the premise of her first self-referential book. 

When asked about a very successful SNL gag that implied Trump’s attendance at a theater performance might result in a repetition of Lincoln’s fate, Timpf (along with Gutfeld and Watters) shrugged it off as nothing important -- no thought given to “unintended” consequences or the uproar that would inevitably (and rightly) ensue were the same barb directed toward Barack Obama.  Only Kellyanne Conway provided a reasonable response by noting that liberals are vastly more willing than conservatives to condone political violence and said so just a few days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination.  Timpf was also able to declare that she often employs the f-word in less restrictive contexts and can joke about her own mastectomy -- as if a self-referential and presumably humorous observation about a personal crisis justifies tasteless and harmful jokes about anything else.  Such justifiably forbidden comedic territory is a landscape upon which Gutfeld!, SNL , and Jimmy Kimmel regularly tread.

While I don’t care for Jessica Tarlov’s pre-packaged TDS talking points, at least her comments represent a perspective that can’t be casually dismissed as coming from a “Poo Detective” (Gutfeld!) or someone who hysterically berates the thoughtful Federalist correspondent Brianna Lyman for a crocheting hobby.  According to Timpf, Brianna is “blowing it” if in her twenties she’s not at a bar getting wasted, smoking cigarettes, throwing up, then going back to the bar.  (See Timpf lose it here at minute 9:30.)   

If Fox News wishes to foil the news-rot conspiracy against it, I suggest utilizing Will Cain for Primetime and employing Johnny Jones, Lisa Boothe, Kayleigh McEnany, Lawrence Jones, Paul Mauro, and Erin Maguire to fill open opinion slots.  Also insist on more decorum from Gutfeld or confine him to late-late night.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

 

 

     

IMMORTALITY VIA ATROCITIES: KILLED TO ORDER by JAN JEKIELEK

 Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were chatting while strolling toward a military parade at Tiananmen Square in September of 2025 when a microphone picked up their comments about living 150 years or longer.  In Communist China, that possibility isn’t just wishful thinking, as Jan Jekielek’s book, Killed to Order, reveals.  The regime clearly has a supply of fresh body parts in prison storage available when needed for elite party members as well as for transplant tourists willing to pay handsomely for an anonymous victim’s liver, kidney, or heart.  The public obituary of an 87-year-old communist official in which he boasts that “many of his components are not his anymore” hints at that fact.  

A more chilling statement comes from the ex-wife of a Chinese surgeon in northwest China.  She asserts that three to four thousand political prisoners were killed for their organs at the hospital where she and her husband worked.  The husband estimated that he removed corneas from around two thousand live prisoners.  In another specific case reliably related to Jekielek, a “Chinese military surgeon killed eight prisoners of conscience to supply one foreign patient with a matching kidney.”

The fate of those subjected to forced organ removals is almost always death and immediate cremation, but one person, Cheng Pei Ming, survived an initial surgery and later told his story.  Cheng was arrested as a Falun Gong member for protesting the group’s persecution.  Tortured in prison, he survived an initial forced surgery.  Prior to what would doubtless have been a second surgery and death, he escaped and eventually made his way to the U.S. via Thailand.  In the States, he discovered that part of his liver and lung had been removed in a procedure that wasn’t health-based.  

In chapter five of Killed to Order, Jekielek provides a chronological arrangement of forced organ-harvesting events that goes back to 1984.  It includes numerous studies by human rights and medical groups that share an inevitable conclusion: The sheer number of Chinese transplants plus short waiting times and the number of transplant hospital beds disprove the regime’s 2015 claim to have ended executions of prisoners specifically for forced organ removals.  Further incriminating evidence is the regime’s attention to medical details like blood type among vast numbers of prisoners, many of whom are tortured.

Jekielek notes that Muslim Uyghurs in Northwest China were the first large group used by the government for forced transplants.  By 1999, however, a spiritual group practicing Falun Gong had grown to as many as 100 million adherents, a number that rivaled the regime’s party membership.  Falun Gong combines Tai Chi–like exercises with meditation and an emphasis on truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance.  This burgeoning practice, rooted in traditional Chinese spirituality, was seen as a threat to the Communist Party and began to be suppressed as a dangerous “cult.”  With thousands imprisoned, Falun Gong became a desirable source of forced organ transplants thanks to their healthy life practices.  

It may come as a surprise to readers that much of this relatively short book is devoted to the Chinese communist belief system, whose sole governing principle is the welfare of the Communist Party.  This focus explains how it’s possible for the regime to dispense with normal ethical standards and to treat the organs of dissidents, or even newborns, as inventory replacement parts for Party members and paying customers.  As part of this analysis of communist thought and practice, Jekielek mentions an intriguing concept introduced by Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Lobaczewski: political pathocracy. 

"In this system, he determined, power doesn’t rise through merit or moral character; it concentrates in the hands of those with sociopathic and psychopathic traits — people devoid of empathy, integrity, or restraint — because those are the qualities most rewarded by the system itself." (This observation, I think, also applies to political parties in the U.S., especially those obsessively focused on the accumulation of government power.)

Jekielek also explains why China’s medical barbarism isn’t widely publicized in the U.S.  Those explanations start with a trip to China in 2001 by New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and other paper bigwigs.  At those meetings, the regime successfully propagandized the delegation with the idea that Falun Gong is a dangerous cult.  Subsequently, the Times largely echoed the Party line vis-à-vis Falun Gong.  In return, Chinese leader Jiang Zemin complemented the Times as “a very good paper.”  It was another Walter Duranty moment in the Times’ inglorious history of spreading communist lies. 

Beyond the newspaper of record’s complicity, Jekielek mentions the illusion that Kissinger’s “opening” to China via trade would lead to China’s liberalization.  In fact, it led to decades of stolen property rights, the undermining of American manufacturing, and a huge market for corporatist billionaires willing to ignore communist atrocities.  Quoting Mark Twain, the author notes, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”  That comment also applies to American universities long influenced by full-paying Chinese students and massive Chinese grants.  Finally, there is the psychological explanation that most people don’t want to believe such horrors are true — a response also encountered by a Polish resistance courier who brought eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to the West.

Jekielek himself, the son of a family that fled communist Poland in the ’70s, is a senior editor at the Epoch Times, a newspaper founded by Falun Gong dissidents in America who earlier experienced the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.  The paper continues to focus attention on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and has thus been a target of CCP-initiated vandalism and repression even in America.  A similar program of intimidation within the U.S. has been directed at the Falun Gong artistic group Shen Yun, which advertises its performances as “China Before Communism.”

Though I have some qualms about the book’s organization, the well documented information it provides about medical atrocities perpetrated by a morally corrupt regime certainly nullifies those reservations.  The more Americans know about China’s atrocities, the less likely they’ll give the regime a moral pass it clearly does not deserve.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: “Who’s to Say?” is also available on Kindle, as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

 

Talarico, With His Left Hand on the Bible

Calling Texas’s Democrat senatorial candidate James Talarico, even derisively, a “bible-banger” is a disservice to bible-bangers.  At least the latter take the book seriously, whereas Talarico uses it as a prop to further his far-left Democrat agenda.  His Wikipedia page even lists “opposition to Christian Nationalism” first among his political positions -- before the legalization of cannabis, expansion of the Supreme Court, and a two-state Palestinian solution that vilifies Israel for “atrocities” and “war crimes” in Gaza.

These priorities were foreshadowed by his education, which started as a University of Texas government major followed by a Masters of Education at Harvard.  Later, while serving in the Texas House of Representatives, he earned a Masters of Divinity degree from Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, an institution associated with the Presbyterian Church USA.  This “mainline” Protestant group has seen its membership drop from over four million in 1965 to likely under one million this year.  It has achieved this “hospice” status, as the author of a recent First Things article notes, “by doing exactly what Talarico now proposes:  subordinating the claims of Scripture to the moral intuitions of secular progressivism and calling the result ‘the gospel.’”  Following Gavin Newsom’s lead vis-à-vis California, Talarico proposes to do for Texas and America what deconstructive theology has done for the PCUSA.

Talarico’s forays into theology are prime examples of Nietzsche’s atheistic critique, “The text has disappeared under the interpretation.”  It takes breathtaking arrogance or ignorance to cite the annunciation to Mary found in Luke 1:26-38 as a scriptural basis for abortion.  According to Reverend Talarico the fact that the angel Gabriel asks Mary’s “consent” prior to her conception somehow constitutes tacit approval of abortion since “creation has to be done with consent.”  Talarico prefaces this fatuous interpretation with the observation that Mary was “an oppressed teenage peasant girl living in poverty under an oppressive empire,” an unsupported assertion that shows where his ideological druthers lie -- much closer to Marx than Matthew or Mark. 

In truth (a word to which deconstructionists are allergic) even if Talarico’s notion of “consent” were accurate, the annunciation scene would only proscribe rape, not Democrat worship at the altar of abortion.  But in fact, prior to Mary’s “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word,” the angel had already announced that “you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.”  Yet miraculously, with his left hand on the most recent printout of Democrat talking points, Talarico manages to turn a “handmaid of the Lord” into an abortion advocate worthy of membership in Planned Parenthood.  Also ignored by the Lone Star divine is the history of early Christians saving exposed and unwanted babies in the Roman Empire and the all but universal Christian condemnation of abortion through the ages.  But apparently for Talarico, Henry Ford, and deconstructionists generally, history is, more or less, bunk.

As for Talarico’s God being “non-binary” based on the fact that the Genesis one masculine word for God in Hebrew (Elohim) is followed by a generally feminine word for “His” breath, wind, or spirit (ruach), this not-so-odd pairing stems ironically from binary-based linguistic principles in languages like Hebrew, Greek, and Spanish where nouns are usually designated either male or female.  More importantly, while languages may have non-sexual male-female gender designations, the Hebrew and Christian scriptures make it perfectly clear that God transcends human sexual categories.  And those human categories Genesis limits to two: “male and female He created them.”  Unlike the philandering Greek gods, the biblical God has no consort, creates by the word, and must not be imaged.  In short, God transcends any of the six human sexes Talarico absurdly asserts “science” has discovered.  One can only imagine what article of leftist faith the recent seminary graduate might deduce from the fact that Elohim has a plural masculine ending (im) regularly used with singular pronouns and verbs.

Talarico clearly criticizes Christians (smeared as Christian Nationalists) more than any other group.  The state rep even vilified this largely conservative cohort for using the bible (plus, I would add, common sense and reliable science) to oppose sex changes for minors.  Those who did so in the state capital, he thundered, not only harmed children, they also dishonored scripture for the sake of a “hateful amendment.”  Stated without leftist distortion, Talarico believes Christians harm children if they oppose their mutilation.  Instead, he embraces the faux science of propagandists who inundated our culture with the bizarre notion that even pre-teens are capable of evaluating the lifelong medical and psychological consequences of transition decisions.  In short, Talarico inverts biblical teaching and slanders Christians who seek to protect “little ones” from the ravages of a mass delusion.

On the other hand, Talarico expresses nothing but appreciation for other “beautiful faith traditions” that are “circling the same truth” as Christianity.  Even conceding that the major religions Talarico explicitly mentions are attempts to express in symbolism and ethical demands the nature of the cosmic “mystery,” it takes a sophomoric novice (or political shyster) to focus only on this grand generalization and to ignore the particulars of each religious tradition, including their historical impacts -- both of which are far from “the same.”  But Slick Jimmy would surely find a way to rationalize the Hindu caste system or the enduring violence and subordination of women that has characterized Islam from its inception -- likely by pointing to a verse in the New Testament that admonishes wives to obey their husbands.  No need to complete the sermon, “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25).

In short, Talarico comes off as an Elmer Gantry on political steroids, using scripture for the sake of a leftist creed that also includes DEI, abortions for transgenders, a “welcome mat” on the border, white skin racism, and green hysteria.  Indeed, he felt so confident about his Marxist-inspired version of reality that he used a middle school teaching position to indoctrinate young students on the dangers of climate change.  In his own words he “freaked them out” with the same existential fears long stoked by AOC.  So not only does Talarico support surgeons who mutilate young bodies, he’s also eager to manipulate their minds and emotions.  Would that Talarico were as respectful of their humanity (and of biblical texts) as he is of the wildly differing attempts to grasp the cosmic mystery he glibly embraces for political effect.

Richard Kirk graduated from Emory University’s school of theology in 1975, taught religion classes professionally from a literary-historical perspective, and is now a freelance writer living in Southern California.  His book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge.

"Trained Emotions" and the Abolition of Temperance

Allan Bloom in his devastating commentary on modern rock music made this observation:  “It may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself.”  Rather than using this intriguing idea to critique Bad Bunny’s repulsive Super Bowl performance (an act that resonated with FOX’s King of Late Night, Greg Gutfeld) I wish to move beyond rotten trees to the more expansive infected forest in which we currently wander.

A short but penetrating book often employed in my philosophy classes was C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man in which he said, “Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.”  I was immediately convinced that those two words, “trained emotions,” would seem absurd to most students since that verbal combination goes counter to almost every relevant message they’ve received in their lives.   

As if to confirm the accuracy of Bloom’s madness-normalcy statement, Google highlights this incorrect “Christian” interpretation of Lewis: 

“Training emotions?” That's ridiculous, you can't train your emotions!  It's just how you feel, nothing can change that. Lewis doesn't deny that, but his point is that not all emotions are right. 

In fairness, the author of the above sentences in her further analysis does attempt, unsuccessfully, to rescue the faulty assertion that Lewis believes “you can’t train your emotions.”  In truth, Lewis means exactly what he and other philosophers have believed for millennia, namely, that emotions can be trained by the human capacity termed the spirit in Plato and “the chest” in Lewis’s treatise.  Indeed, Lewis decries a modern approach to education that has produced “men without chests” by failing to develop the human faculty that’s the source of courage, self-control, and the proper appreciation of things.  As Lewis says, echoing Plato, “The little human animal will not at first have the right responses.  It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful.”

Instead of embracing Lewis’s and Plato’s doctrine of objective value (the idea that things merit corresponding emotional responses) we now unthinkingly embrace the idea that emotions are uncontrollable responses to stimuli and that beauty is solely in the eye (or spleen) of the beholder.  Unfortunately, it’s a short hop from this aesthetic assumption to the philosophical assertion that good and bad, morally speaking, are no more than our personal emotional responses to things.  Indeed, this belief was perhaps the most common assumption held by my students who insisted that the slaughter of innocent humans (as in the Holocaust) was only “wrong in my own opinion” rather than objectively wrong.

A virtue directly connected to the “spirit” (Lewis’s “chest”) and almost never touted nowadays is temperance.  Today that term is largely associated only with abstinence from alcohol, but historically the virtue concerned controlling and properly directing appetites and emotions.  Aristotle emphasized habit as the primary means of developing temperance -- of feeling pleasure at doing good things and displeasure at doing bad things.  But today habits are disparaged as much as temperance is ignored, while emotional impact is the premier currency employed in commercials, Hollywood productions, pop music, internet posts, and many graduation addresses.  Institutionally, only in military boot camp is Aristotle’s insight taken seriously so recruits will be able to control their emotions under fire.  

A half century ago Marshall McLuhan distinguished the dying culture of print from the new electronic culture.  The former, he noted, was formed largely by the abstract communication of printed words which facilitated unified linguistic standards, rational discourse, and the ability to act without reacting -- a quality preeminently exemplified by  jet pilots and astronauts who keep cool under pressure.  By contrast, the new electronic culture of the sixties featured emotional immediacy conveyed by music and visual images, all now exponentially increased by instantaneously composed, conveyed, and received computer messages.  McLuhan likened this new informational world to the “tribal drum.”  

If one assumes that emotions can’t be trained, then people are, as Lewis asserted, “powerless against the animal organism” -- that is, against our instincts and raw emotions which are being constantly manipulated and stimulated by the “tribal drums” of electronic images.  Consider the internet wasteland that provided the violent propaganda motivating that Canadian transgender youth who recently killed his mother, stepbrother, and several others at school in a small British Columbia town.  This young mass murderer not only put immense stock in his own emotions, those feelings were also given inordinate weight by “professionals” who couldn’t summon the wit or courage to provide a diagnosis that opposed the wrong-sex prescription repeated endlessly by media to a mentally disturbed teenager.

Far from “training” emotions, our culture regularly praises “groundbreaking” actions that destroy limits on expression and belief.  Implicitly and often explicitly, obscenity is taken as a sign of cultural sophistication as are activities that contain egregious displays of sexual perversion to which the label “mature” are absurdly attached.  In short, sensationalism and sheer novelty are often associated with progress, whereas self-control is disparaged as “self-censorship,” the assumption being that whatever one feels ought to be expressed, and likely expressed in public.  No joke is too crude for the King of Late Night, and no expression of political venom is too over the top for his competitors.   

It is possible, as Plato and Lewis assert, to train one’s emotions, but our “tribal drum” culture militates against and actively discourages it with almost every image and message that emanates from its corrupt media.  Temperance in our time need not uncritically reflect Victorian or 1950s mores, but absent development of the human capacity to train emotions, a culture drowning in moral and emotional chaos is inevitable.

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle , as is his book Poetry with a Moral Edge

Does "Jesus Gets Us" Get Jesus?

 They look in the mirror of their souls and see Jesus.  That’s the best explanation of the “Jesus Gets Us” campaign.  This biographical process isn’t a new phenomenon as even a cursory study of “life of Jesus” literature makes clear. 

The most famous review of previous “lives of Jesus” was written by the scholarly humanitarian Albert Schweitzer:  Von Reimarus zu Wrede: eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, a title often translated as The Quest of the Historical Jesus.  Here’s Schweitzer’s prefatory summary:  “Thus each successive epoch of theology found its own thoughts in Jesus”—a rational Messiah, a romantic Jesus, a social gospel reformer, et cetera.  Ironically, Schweitzer’s own portrait pointed to an inscrutable but spiritually powerful figure focused on the end of times about whom nothing much could be confidently known.

To be fair, most scholarly portraits resulted from attempts to utilize what was considered reliable biblical evidence.  As far as I can tell, the “Jesus Gets Us” folk compose their caricature based on a single act performed by Jesus on his disciples and a 60s Beatles’ song, “All You Need Is Love.”  Missing is any serious consideration of the plethora  of data points that provide a more realistic portrait of the first century Jew hailed as “the Christ” (i.e. the Messiah) by his followers.  Since “Jesus Gets Us” ads evidence no concern for “historical critical” issues and takes the biblical narrative at face value, I shall do the same and see how that narrative comports with their foot-washing Jesus. 

As noted earlier, there is only one gospel account of Jesus washing feet (John 13:1-15), and that was performed on his apostles at the Last Supper.  It’s unclear how “Jesus gets us” folk would incorporate the perfumed anointing of Jesus’ own feet by a woman described as “a sinner” (Luke 7:48ff.) into their ads or, more to the point, the judgmental command to “sin no more” given to another woman caught in adultery whose stoning was nixed by Jesus’ suggestion that the first stone be cast by someone without sin (John 8:11).   

Furthermore, I can’t imagine the “Jesus Gets Us” Messiah issuing this dictum: “I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, makes her an adulteress; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery” (Matthew 6:32).  It’s hard to see that same Jesus washing the feet of a woman emerging from an abortion mill like Planned Parenthood.  Then there’s the warning to, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves,” an admonition that could arguably be applied to obsessive foot-washers.  Indeed, it’s hard to envision those folks taking seriously half or more of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), especially this rather harsh command:  “Do not give dogs what is holy; and do not throw your pearls before swine“ (Matthew 7:6).  Finally, the Jesus who overturns the tables of money-changers in the Temple (Mark 11:15-17) is clearly filled with more righteous indignation than the “no questions asked” foot-washer who effectively inverts the biblical Master’s command to “be wise as serpents and harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16). 

This incompatibility exercise could be extended ad nauseam, but it’s sufficient to show that the “Jesus Gets Us” portrait is, to be generous, incomplete.  There are, to be sure, a significant number of sayings and stories that comport well with the foot-washing image:  association with outcasts (e.g. Samaritans, women, and sinners of various stripes), the command to love one’s enemies, and a readiness to forgive transgressions.  But left out of the “Jesus Gets Us” portrait is a clear moral, spiritual voice that is diminished and distorted by a silent Messiah on his knees tacitly overlooking moral outrages that litter twenty first century America and for which, like “family planning,” Leftists have a soft spot in their hearts.

This Jesus who keeps his mouth shut and does what the Jesus of the gospels never does (i.e. wash the feet of prostitutes, political protesters, and haters of scriptural tradition) is precisely the Jesus folks desire who wish to consign religion to an irrelevant closet.  No moral demands, no condemnations, no judgments come from this Jesus-- only an action that implies passive acquiescence.  Apparently, for the “Jesus Gets Us” crew the ambiguous “Judge not” admonition in Matthew 7:1 constitutes the only verbal command they take to heart. The following verses (2-5), however, clearly imply judgments, but judgments based on self-reflection and humility.  An “absolutist” interpretation would mean that nothing will be expected of those who pass no judgments at all (cf. v. 2) and thus would contradict the plethora of judgments made by Jesus himself (cf. Matthew 23) and also expected of his followers (e.g. Mark 6:7-12).       

It is the “no-judgment, foot-washing Jesus” that seems to inhabit the souls of those who, ironically, don’t wish to arouse the kind of hatred from the powers that be that brought about the crucifixion of the real Jesus.  This “no judgment” mentality is also, not coincidentally, the default position within our largely libertine pop culture, a rule that is invariably broken to judge the “judgmental” — i.e. individuals and institutions that give voice to traditional or biblical moral standards. 

The “Jesus Gets Us” Jesus doesn’t “get” the One who spoke a lot more about exalted moral and spiritual truths than he foot-washed.  The construct does provide, however, an acceptable religious image for a permissive, rudderless culture scared to death of being judged by its rotten fruit.  For that culture a non-suffering, non-speaking, non-confrontational foot-washer works quite well.   

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle    

                

The "frigitity" of collectivism and real sources of warmth

Now New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged to replace “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” It was a bit surprising that “the Zohran” employed the term “collectivism” instead of the word effusively and loosely employed by political and ministerial do-gooders, “community.”  Perhaps he thought the latter sounded too much like “communism.” 

His political soulmate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was savvy enough to cloak her government-centered paradise in the image of a “village” -- which in most minds conjures up visions of a largely rural setting with a few hundred homes inhabited by families gathered around the warmth of a fireplace and by individuals who voluntarily assist neighbors that mostly attend three or four different houses of worship, shop at local stores, and are acquainted with the village banker. 

Of course that’s not what HRC really had in mind, her preference being ecologically-dictated, city-centered, government-subsidized apartments with as few “nuclear families” as demographically possible.  Recall the Obama utopia provided in his (and doubtless Hillary’s) “Life of Julia” cartoon.  This “villager” was an independent yuppie who focused first on her career as a web designer, had a single child at 31 (with no husband or father mentioned), later starts her own business, and then retires at 67. Finally, supported by social security and Obamacare, she begins volunteering at a community garden, presumably seeking a little human warmth or perhaps doing penance.  

Mamdani’s tendentious alternatives, of course, mischaracterize both options.  “Rugged individualism” was a characteristic of a few pioneers who acted as Giants in the Earth, but even most of these heroes depended on families for warmth and succor.  What Mamdani disparages, in truth, are folks, largely in families, who are self-sufficient.  Even a “village” that takes care of its own affairs is unwelcome in “the Zohran’s” eyes.  Indeed, it was the prevalence of voluntary associations, not “rugged individualism” that impressed the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville as he traversed America in the age of Jackson. “Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite....  Americans use associations to give fetes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools.”  This communal self-sufficiency is Mamdani’s nightmare.  What he aspires to see is dependence on government and absolute power in his own manicured Red hands.

Unfortunately for America, its habit of communal self-sufficiency is no longer a defining characteristic, as the desire for Washington D.C. to pay for or provide goods and services for lone individuals and favored groups has grown exponentially -- something Tocqueville called the danger of  “democratic despotism” lurking in the nation’s future thanks to a dissolution of its religiously-based moral fiber.  Instead of exhibiting any brand of “rugged individualism,” most Americans are painfully aware that they now exist within a largely corporate techno-culture enervated by mass immigration and slouching toward globalism.  Such a social order, as the politics of Minnesota, California, and New York illustrate, is ripe for the deceptive “warmth” of collectivist rhetoric.  As for the frigid individualism of Mamdani’s fantasies, it now takes the form of Bowling Alone.   

Ayn Rand, who experienced the expropriating “warmth” of Lenin’s collectivist society before moving to America in 1926, observed that “[s]ocialism is the doctrine that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that his life and his work do not belong to him, but belong to society, that the only justification of his existence is his service to society, and that society may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.”  “Frigidity” is a term that accurately attaches to that dehumanizing doctrine whose warmth is often obtained only by emaciated bodies huddled together in a Siberian concentration camp.  Less dramatically, one might picture the “frigidity” of an impersonal crowd seated uncomfortably in a large, drab one-room facility waiting for their assigned numbers to be broadcast by a score of bureaucrats assigned duties behind individual windows at the Department of Motor Vehicles.  Without a return to the warmth of personal moral responsibility within the confines of families and local communities, the continued expansion of that DMV experience to our broader “collective” society will likely continue apace while only privileged comrades in Gracie Mansions around the country enjoy the non-collective perk of bidets in their washrooms.  

AN INCONVENIENT STUDY

 

Even persons familiar with RFK Jr.’s damning statistics about American health might be surprised by the information contained in Del Bigtree’s new documentary An Inconvenient Study, a film that also depicts with gut-wrenching impact the human misery represented by those numbers thanks to the cowardice, greed, arrogance, and power of the medical and pharmaceutical industries.                                                                                                                    

The film’s Emmy Award-winning producer has been a medical journalist for two decades, first at CBS and later as host of “The High Wire” Internet show.  Bigtree’s prior documentary, Vaxxed (2015), brought him to national attention when the film, which had been touted by Robert De Niro, was pulled from the actor’s own Tribeca Film Festival for being anti-vaccine and containing junk science.  This linked news segment about the incident provides an example of how major media serves as a megaphone for powerful corporate interests--a role effectively noted in An Inconvenient Study. 

The aforementioned RFK Jr. statistics can be summarized using this single data point:  54 percent of American kids now have a chronic disease of some sort, whereas in the 1980s that number was 12.8 percent.  Coincident with that precipitous rise has been a dramatic increase in the number of vaccines administered to kids from birth to age 18--from around 20 in the 1980s to 72 or more now. The question raised by this correlation is obvious:  Is there a causal link between vaccinations and chronic disease and especially between vaccinations and the huge increase in autism?    

The specific study that Bigtree’s film revolves around was done by the Henry Ford Health System and was directed by Ford’s Head of Infectious Diseases, Dr. Marcus Zervos.  It was designed as retrospective and compared health outcomes of vaccinated with unvaccinated patients in Ford’s system.  Such a study is the only option available since medical authorities consider double-blind placebo trials of vaccines unethical.  A study of that sort, it’s argued, would be using kids as guinea pigs.  Consequently, vaccines are often tested against similar vaccines, trials that show if one vaccine is more dangerous than its cousin but not if either vaccine has unintended consequences.   Additionally, some tests to secure the “safe and effective” label reiterated ad nauseam by politicians, media, and the pharmaceutical industry, are absurdly small and of short duration, as was true of the Hepatitis B recombinant vaccine often administered to infants on the first day of life.  Its safe and effective label was secured by testing 147 infants for 5 days.

Three prior retrospective studies are presented in the film.  Each showed significantly negative results for the vaccinated.  Dr. Peter Abby focused only on the DTP vaccine he administered to half the children of the African country of Guinea-Bissau.  Thirty years later he found that while the vaccine was effective at preventing diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough, those infants who took the vaccine died from other diseases at five times the rate of the unvaccinated.  A more limited cohort of patients was broadly analyzed by a Portland pediatrician who discovered negative outcomes for the vaccinated in terms of allergies, autoimmune diseases, ADHD, and infections of all kinds.  For his trouble the doc had his published paper retracted and his medical license revoked.  Another physician was “dragged through the coals” for a study analyzing 600 kids.  It showed significantly negative results for vaccinated patients in terms of allergies, neurological disorders, and especially autism.   

As with the movie Vaxxed, these studies were panned for being too small or otherwise flawed in ways that voided their unwanted findings.  Consequently Bigtree pushed hard for Dr. Zervos, a respected pro-vaccine doctor at a major medical center, to use Ford’s extensive data base to perform a comprehensive and rigorous vaccinated vs. unvaccinated analysis.  In 2020 Zervos agreed to oversee such a project and to publish it no matter the results.  In pressing his case, Bigtree noted that such a study could finally shut the mouths of vaccine critics like himself.  Two years later the analysis had been completed but the Ford Health group wouldn’t publish it.  Its results, however, were made available to Bigtree.  

The climax of the documentary is Bigtree’s hidden camera discussion with Zervos (June 5, 2022) during which the producer makes a final plea to Zervos to make good on his prior pledge to publish the study no matter the results.  Zervos acknowledges that the study with its largely negative findings for the modern vaccine regimen was, in his opinion, a good study that should be published.  He insists, however, that in the current political and media environment its publication will only result in his firing and a trashing of the study’s quality.  In Zervos’s own words, “Publishing something like that, I might as well retire.  I’d be finished.”  Zervos knew whereof he spoke since previously he had been torn apart for publishing an heretical article on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID.  He wasn’t willing, he told Bigtree, to go through that again. “I can’t handle it.”

The Ford Study was based on a population of 18,468 subjects, 1,957 of whom were fully unvaccinated.  The results were, in Bigtree’s words, “A bombshell.”  Among the devastating findings were the following:  the vaccinated group had a six times higher risk for autoimmune diseases, a four times higher risk for asthma diagnoses, a 5.6 times higher risk for neurodevelopmental disorders, and a 4.47 times higher risk for speech disorders.  Several comparisons were statistically impossible to calculate because no cases of the disorder were found among the unvaccinated, conditions that included brain dysfunction, diabetes, behavioral problems, learning disabilities, and ADHD (the latter of which had 262 diagnoses among the vaccinated).  A similar mathematical issue arose with autism where the single case among the unvaccinated could not be usefully compared to 23 within the vaccinated cohort.

A summary statistic found that after ten years there was an 83 percent likelihood that the unvaccinated would avoid any chronic disease whereas in the vaccinated group there was only a 43 percent chance of being free of a chronic disease.  This result tracks perfectly with the aforementioned fact that over half of American kids now suffer from some chronic disease.  The devastating human toll for medical, pharmaceutical, political, and media complicity in silencing studies like those mentioned in An Inconvenient Study  is presented during the first twenty minutes of the film.  It can be viewed for free on the Internet via aninconvenientstudy.com  as long as Bigtree resists Ford Health’s cease and desist order. 

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle    

An Enemy Within: America’s Pop Culture

What’s contemporary Top 40 music like?  It isn’t a question I would have been inclined to ask were I not forced by my cable company to go initially to that Sirius channel before tuning to soft rock, country, or classical offerings.  What caught my ear, however, during those brief exposure episodes was the sameness of the bland sounds emitted before I switched to more familiar styles.  Eventually I decided to endure several consecutive Top 40 Sirius songs to see if my random encounters were representative, and lo and behold, they were!

Typically the artist’s voice is only slightly more prominent than background synthesizer music.   To employ a visual analogy, that background sound would be captured by a palette of undifferentiated yellowish browns.  Rarely does one hear distinctive musical instruments that were integral components of most musical offerings just a few decades ago.  Occasionally uninspiring piano and drum accompaniments are discernible, but there’s nothing like Mick Fleetwood’s drums or the brassy excellence of Chicago.     

The musical scores in Top 40 are also hugely repetitive and generally possess all the range and complexity of bad elevator music—characteristics shared by the vocalists who thankfully rush through their lyrics a la Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime fiasco.  This defect is occasionally remedied for teenage fans and maturity-stunted adults by videos that supply the often inaudible wording.  Failing that musical patch, lyrics are always accessible on the net.  

Even the songs of Taylor Swift are, at best, incremental improvements on the above descriptions.  A columnist for the UK Times, Rod Liddle, had the courage to label Swift a “caterwauling blonde moppet” who produces “banal and life-sapping sub-Kardashian electropop drivel,” and for his literary trouble received a restraining order from the popstress’s lawyers.  Readers can judge for themselves the accuracy of Liddle’s review based on this hit romantically titled “Slut.”    

The moral tenor of contemporary Top 40 offerings, not surprisingly, coincides with the songs’ lack of acoustical virtuosity.  A piece that accurately reflects that congruence is innocently titled “Diet Pepsi” by a singer named Addison Rue.  The video consists of a series of bra and panties erotic poses in the front and back seat of a ’65 Mustang driven by a James Dean type.  A somewhat rappish singer named Lola Young who climbed to number one on several Euro-charts takes care of the narcissistic, f-bomb, parent-trashing spectrum with “Messy.”

The moral vacuity, of course, isn’t limited to hetero-normatives as this headline explains: “Lesbian viral sensation Gigi Perez has admitted that her queer anthem ‘Sailor Song’ changed her life.”  The full lyrics are linked here and include these lines addressed to her same-sex object of desire:  “I don’t believe in God, but I believe that you’re my savior” plus “And when we’re getting dirty, I forget all that is wrong.”     

I’m well aware that pop and rap songs largely aimed at kids from 9 to 19 aren’t a space to consult for uplifting moral sentiment, but nowadays the degrading, self-centered undertow has become a lyrical and visual squalor that’s even reflected in a poverty of musical excellence.  Whereas post-WWI Dadaism was a self-conscious mocking of established standards, today’s pop music represents, I think, a largely unconscious assumption of the id-generated desires promulgated preeminently in Hollywood.  Although these themes have been present in pop music for decades (most revoltingly in Madonna’s sacrilegious video “Like a Prayer”) today’s pop music, with MTV-spawned visuals, is saturated with the basest lyrics that seldom reach beyond the singer’s primal desires--no more tying ribbons around old oak trees or occasionally teaching the world to sing in perfect harmony.   

Does all this attention to Top 40 music really matter?  I’m afraid it does.  Recently Douglas Murray at an Alliance for Responsible Citizenship meeting mentioned a politician who proudly noted how the extraordinary events of October 7 brought forth extraordinary young people ready to meet that crisis. Murray observed that her statement needed an important adjustment, namely that it isn’t just extraordinary events that throw up extraordinary youths, instead “it’s extraordinary events when they come up against people who have been extraordinarily well cultured” (minute 7).

Is it possible that a society that countenances, praises, or ignores Top 40 garbage like the aforementioned can produce a sufficient number of extraordinary youths to meet future crises?  Combine those toxic sounds and images with their cinematic cousins and Americans face a Herculean stable clean-up task.  It is encouraging that military recruitment spiked significantly following President Trump’s election, but the power of the “resistance” baked deep in our culture is akin to a cancer slowly spreading its tentacles into a body’s vital organs.  It’s a disease that won’t be eliminated by four years of political therapy.  A more radical intervention will be required, the prerequisite to which is acknowledging the mortal danger itself.    

 Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle    

 

Charlie Kirk's Legacy

In The Mission Robert Bolt’s Jesuit priest (Jeremy Irons) is shot dead while carrying a cross in a pacific procession while protecting his 18^th century Indian community from Portuguese troops whose masters seek to enslave them.  Two decades earlier Bolt dramatized a pious Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons.  More’s papal-grounded opposition to Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn is rewarded with imprisonment and, after the perjured testimony of a one-time admirer, beheading.  Not long ago Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino dies to save his young foreign friend by exposing those who threatened him.  Eastwood’s irascible character, Walt, lies stretched out in cruciform after having been pummeled with bullets by a neighborhood gang in plain sight of onlookers. 

Those examples are cinematic creations that pay tribute in various ways to their spiritual predecessor.  Charlie Kirk, however, was a Christ figure in real life.  Far from a “spreader of hate” as asserted by politicians and commentators who specialize in that activity, Charlie practiced respectful dialogue and viewed even rude interlocutors as fellow humans created in the image of God.  Anyone taking the time to sample the many hours of dialogue available will never see any name-calling or personal insults proceed from his mouth.  Instead one witnesses an impressive willingness to listen to opposing comments.  Those who disagree are encouraged to “come to the front of the line,” and their often ill-tempered challenges are met with thoughtful, sometimes forceful, responses.  Frequently Charlie seeks points of agreement from which further dialogue becomes possible. 

In encounters with exponents of the narcissistic relativism that permeates American campuses, Charlie sought to expose the vacuity of arguments that reject God or Nature’s God as the fundamental ground for morality.  “My heart” and “my truth” provide no rational counter-argument to “Mao’s truth” or “Stalin’s truth.”  Absent a more fundamental foundation even “the greatest good for the greatest number” melts into a hodge-podge of undefined terms.  What is meant by “greatest good” or by “greatest number,” and how do we understand the word “good”?  And why must everyone follow this formula if nothing undergirds it?  Such are the infuriating questions posed in Socratic fashion to students who have been told (not  taught) that religion is foolish superstition, that the Western tradition represents the prejudices of old white men, and that morality is nothing more than a person’s own “values.”  

It was galling to detractors that this vibrant, intellectually intimidating young man gained his insights by consulting the Western literary tradition and contemporary scholars like Thomas Sowell—especially taking to heart the wisdom contained in the Old and New Testaments. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” was a skeptical observation from two millennia past.  A contemporary echo of that comment would be “Charlie didn’t go to college and quotes the Bible”--an observation that condemns most of higher education rather than the intellectual stature of the autodidact who rejected schooling’s institutional corruption.  

As Dennis Prager regularly observed, “You have to go to college to believe some things.”  Men can become women and vice-versa.  A man who has undergone hormonal treatment to appear more feminine can compete on an equal playing field with women.  You are the sex (‘gender”) you want to be.  A man who wants to be a woman is a woman and thus entitled to undress in the women’s locker room and to invade a women’s spa.  A mountain of evidence and common sense was available for Charlie to counter those absurdities--millennia of tradition plus obvious physiological, psychological , and chromosomal differences.  Similar arguments were presented to abortion advocates who equate “my body” with the nascent life having its own genetic structure within that body.

To religious or “spiritual” challenges that stress “Jesus gets us” tolerance, Charlie presented the Jesus of  Scripture (John 8:1-11) who not only saved the woman accused of adultery from being stoned but also approached her and said, “Go, and sin no more.”  Yes, mercy is fundamental to Christianity but also the truth about sin.  The latter value, Kirk noted, has been forgotten or even condemned as “judgmental” not only by popular culture but also by a vast number of Christians.

Perhaps most of all Charlie was hated as the image of a personal goodness that exposes, like sunlight, the moral and spiritual decay of our culture and of individuals consumed by that decadence.  He was a faithful husband with two beautiful children, to whose welfare he was passionately devoted.  He engaged in a disciplined, spiritually informed health regimen—no drugs, exercise, healthy food and drink.  He was remarkably judicious in the use of his time, a trait inimical to a culture awash in slothful self-indulgence.  Such things arouse self-loathing when one looks in the mirror and sees the polar opposite.  Now his assassination has exposed the evil that brims with revulsion at an utterly decent  husband and father who was skilled at respectful and forceful dialogue—a Christian devoted to God, family, and country.

 “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24).  So may it be with the death of Charlie Kirk.  

Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?"  is also available on Kindle