In late April 2019, before he walked into a synagogue in Poway, California, and opened fire, John Earnest wrote a seven-page manifesto spelling out his core beliefs: That Jewish people, guilty in his view of faults ranging from killing Jesus to controlling the media, deserved to die; that his intention to kill Jews would glorify God.

Chuck Colson regularly stated that “what was once unthinkable, becomes debatable and gradually becomes acceptable.” Independent journalist, Jeremiah Keenan, recently reported in The Federalist magazine a rather astonishing legal development concerning a 14 year old child, the child’s parents and the judicial system of British Columbia, Canada. It magnifies the bizarre and almost unthinkable developments in the next frontier of the human sexuality within Western Civilization. It also raises the troubling question of when do the rights of a child undermine parental rights? In this developing new normal, parents have limited rights, while the state sanctions sexual experimentation and novelty in the name of human rights.

In the 1960s 1 in 6 Americans belonged to a mainline Protestant church. Today it is 1 in 20, and falling. More broadly, the number of self-described Christians in the US has continued to drop and is now below 70%. The United Methodist Church (UMC) offers a rather poignant example of the confusion and tension when a Protestant church abandons its theological and doctrinal roots.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is a macroeconomic theory that has won recent converts, especially presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), who argues that this is how she would finance her radical Green New Deal.

In April 1994, an aircraft bearing Rwanda’s president Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down and Rwanda’s majority ethnic group, the Hutus, blamed the Tutsis and began a systematic massacre of the Tutsis, killing over 800,000 in three months. The Tutsis then rebelled, killing many Hutus and thereby conquering most of Rwanda by mid-July 1994. This egregious slaughter on both sides is one of the great horrors of the 20th century.

Within the Democratic Party, especially within the Progressive Left, support for the B.D.S. Movement is growing. B.D.S. is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions initiative against Israel, seeking to exert economic, moral and political pressure on Israel. Founded in 2005 with a statement of principles, the B.D.S. “call” has been signed by more than 170 Palestinian organizations around the world.

The year 2014 marked the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society” address, delivered at the spring commencement for the University of Michigan. Johnson’s speech remains the most ambitious call to date by any president to use the power of the national government to effect a far-reaching transformation of American society. In a broad sense, the calls of today’s Democratic socialists resemble LBJ’s call.

In mid-February 2019, The Houston Chronicle published a series of articles exposing with “painfully specific documentation,” hundreds of sexual abusers who have worked within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) over the last 20 years.

Some in the progressive left of the Democratic Party are advocating a form of “Democratic Socialism” as the solution to “the inequality in American society and to an economy rigged in the favor of vested interests.” Bernie Sanders is of course the standard bearer of this movement (and to some extent, Elizabeth Warren), but it is now being energized by more radical socialists, principally Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

One of the major political struggles of our day is whether nations are embracing a democratic order, centered in the will of the people, or an authoritarian one, characterized by a strongman who satisfies the demand for a more muscular, assertive leader. After World War II, the optimistic vision was of a more democratic, open world with free trade, open borders and empowered citizens throughout the world. That vision appears to be dead. In fact, some would argue that the world is embracing a more authoritarian order.