Assad is a tyrant and a tool of Iranian empire. He deserves whatever is coming.

But the al-Qaida adjacent monsters about to take over are a catastrophe: For the Syrian Christians, Druze, and the Kurds, as well as for Israel and the Arab monarchies.

1/ What a mess the US has made in Syria:

1 By overthrowing neighboring regimes in Iraq, Libya, Egypt.

2 By backing al-Qaida adjacent Sunni fanatics to go after Assad.

3 By pretending Sunni imperialist Turkey is a US “ally.”

4 By refusing heavy arms for the Kurds.

/2

For 346 days—from Oct 7, 2023 until the detonation of 4000 Hezballah beepers in Lebanon on Sept 17—the Biden administration kept Israel’s hands tied, trying to force an early “peace” that would prevent an Israeli victory. Those days have ended. tabletmag.com/sections/israe… In November, 2023, I laid out the Biden administration’s strategy for the entire war: Supply Israel but *prevent* Israeli victory in order to maintain a “balance of power” between Israel and Iran in the Middle East. /2

https://twitter.com/yhazony/status/1721775888755212740

I hate to spend even ten minutes on a lowlife like Avik Roy. But he recently gave a 45-minute interview in which he repeatedly says NatCons seek a "white ethnostate" in America as our "core" goal. I want to make sure everyone understands who and what this guy is.
/1 Avik Roy's "white ethnostate" interview was posted as a podcast on Law and Liberty along with a transcript of the interview. You can read it here:

/2lawliberty.org/podcast/toward…

For months friends have been asking me: "What's wrong with James Lindsay? Why's he acting so strange?"

I've been saying I don't really know. He refuses to even have a conversation with me.

But I finally have some thoughts to share: A thread on "What's wrong with James?"

/1 The first thing to understand about where James's head is right now is that he believes "conservative Christianity" is about to be "largely politically nullified" in the United States.

/2

https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1659951005369245696?s=20

If you don’t know the Bible well, you cannot understand the forces that created the Western world.

If you don’t know the great thinkers of the common law tradition, you cannot understand the forces that created Britain and America.

1/ The reason the Bible and the common law tradition have been excluded from the history of ideas and political theory is that they give expression to human particularity—and not *only* to human universals.

But you cannot understand human beings without human particularity.

/2

Bob Kagan dictated this party line in March 2019—in a Wapo essay explaining that NatCons really just want to bring dictatorship to America.

Since then the choirboys keep writing the same ridiculous essay—without so much as adding a new thought to it.

/1 theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… I love how they can’t even come up with a new color scheme.

/2

washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/…

An alliance does not require a “fusion” of interests or identities. It’s a limited collaboration in pursuit of specific common aims.

Alliance between Jews and Christians doesn’t require “fusion.”

Alliance between anti-Marxist liberals and conservatives doesn’t require “fusion.” The 1960s strategy of “fusion” between anti-Marxist liberals and conservatives was based on the negation of conservatism as an independent movement with a vision and an identity of its own.

/2

Three superb essays defending "Christian nationalism" were published in the last week by young Protestant and Catholic writers in the US.

This is a dramatic breakthrough after years in which many American Christian writers have been equivocal on this subject.

Essays below.

/1 This is from @William_E_Wolfe at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary:

2/

standingforfreedom.com/2022/07/whats-…

Christian friends have been writing to ask me where Jewish law stands on abortion. The simple answer is: Jewish law forbids abortion except where the mother's life is in danger.

True, some *liberal* Jews have a different view. Here's an example:

/1

https://twitter.com/truahrabbis/status/1540339672106295297?s=20&t=MB-dcw-9Xuv_oDrLrvOQUQ

What you should learn from this is that liberal Jewish organizations don't necessarily have much expertise in Jewish law.

So who can you turn to? Here's a short statement about abortion from the orthodox Coalition for Jewish Values:

/2

coalitionforjewishvalues.org/wp-content/upl…

Young people, you have to admit:

The conservative movement in America *did* conserve one thing over the last generation. It kept alive the belief in the sanctity of human life.

Now it has achieved an unprecedented restoration of sound constitutional law in America.

1/

https://twitter.com/njhochman/status/1540758582911651840

Maybe now you can set aside some of that glib contempt for your parents’ generation that I’ve heard so often.

And the self-congratulatory pronouncements about how only people under forty “get it.”

2/

America has one strategic rival right now: China.

America has one major foreign policy aim: To overtake and ultimately to defeat China in a long cold war that the US is presently losing.

/1 Russia is not a significant threat to the US.

For America, a war with Russia in Ukraine would be a vast diversion of attention and resources in the wrong direction.

The only sure winner of an American war in Ukraine would be China.

/2

We are watching an elite-led cultural revolution, being conducted *from above* by powerful institutions in the name of oppressed minorities.

1/

https://twitter.com/martyrmade/status/1463163951974391813

This was impossible in classical Marxism, because Marx and Engels regarded the capitalists and their allies—that is, the elites—as the oppressors.

2/

Andrew, I’m surprised at this. Burke is famous for breaking with the Whig party over the French Revolution—and allying himself with the Tories.

Throughout he claimed loyalty to the “Old Whigs” (traditionalist conservatives) and rejected the “New Whigs” (today’s liberals).

/1

https://twitter.com/sullydish/status/1462365742465232902

What did Burke and the Old Whigs believe? They defended tradition, the established church, monarchy, and aristocracy—against liberals (New Whigs) like Richard Price, Charles James Fox, Priestly, Paine and Jefferson, who favored reason, equality and religious disestablishment.

/2

No. Nationalism is derived from biblical political theology. It is based on the Scriptural belief that humans beings and their institutions are diverse and see the world from divergent perspectives.

/1

https://twitter.com/rafaeldearizaga/status/1454108441446952960

For this reason, every community and nation must be responsible for its own path to God.

There is no such thing as a human institution that is competent to dictate political doctrine to all mankind—or one that can do so without becoming a tyranny.

/2

This is a surprisingly well-researched and balanced NYT essay on the growing rebellion against liberalism among American and European conservatives.

/1

https://twitter.com/longform/status/1450469321701011466

The biggest problem with this analysis is that it tends to see a revived (“post-liberal”) conservatism as a basically Catholic phenomenon.

/2

The "spirit" is something real in all human beings--what the Bible calls "ruah" and Plato calls "thymos."

It's what allows us to be angry and sad, to want things and to strive for truth and to be loyal and connected to our family and nation and to stand in awe before God.

/1 But it means little to "be spiritual." Human beings are all, by nature, "spiritual."

/2

Here's a longer, rephrased version of what I said before:

Birth rates are collapsing throughout the America and Europe. The numbers are well below replacement almost everywhere.

The reason: Liberalism (or individualism) of course.

/1

nytimes.com/2021/06/16/us/… It is liberalism (or individualism) that focuses everyone's attention on what *you* feel like doing. On what would be fun for *you*.

It is liberalism that turns us away from broader commitments.

/2

There was always a problem with the academic study of “classical antiquity,” which was built around the assumption that the West was descended from Greece and Rome—but not from Israel and the Bible.
nationalreview.com/news/princeton… This was an “Enlightenment” theory and it was a nasty one. It was anti-Semitic and anti-Christian too.

Catholic friends have been urging me to read Waldstein on the common good. So I finally did.

I won’t comment on the theology. But as political theory this essay is naive and misguided. As a basis for political conservatism, it’s a non-starter. /1 thejosias.com/2015/02/03/the… There are a several problems here. But let’s begin at the end:

Waldstein wants to found the political theory of the state on the thesis that the “primary intrinsic common good” of every legitimate state is “peace.”
(Thesis 34)

I’m sure peace is an aspect of the common good. /2

I don’t accept this new norm, which supposes that when a public figure dies, it’s a signal for everyone who disagreed with him in life to start dancing on his grave. A decent public culture regards funerals as a time when each of us looks for the positive meaning that can be found in the life of the deceased.

In liberal societies, the custom of giving honor to your parents has mostly been wiped out by equality (and now equity).

Most young people don’t even know they’re being transgressive when they correct their parents, elders, bosses.

They don’t know they are dishonoring them.

https://twitter.com/flower_capital/status/1361302631625465858

If you learn the Mosaic Ten Precepts in school, you at least have to discuss the topic of honoring your father and mother—and what you owe older people and ancestors more generally.

When Bible education was eliminated from the schools, all this became alien terrain.