J Caleb Jones

The world’s leading expert on the Star of the Magi (unfortunately the world doesn’t know it yet). See more at

[J Caleb Jones @JCalebJones]

If you’ve ever wanted to know what is happening in the sky in Matthew 2 with the star that the Magi saw, the video that is only available at this website will explain everything that is happening.

And yes, it actually happened exactly as it is described in the text.

The price to watch the video is for you to provide your email address so that you can be informed of future videos, explaining other aspects of the Nativity based on this information about the Star of the Magi.

https://t.co/FmWFzd5ldh

[J Caleb Jones @JCalebJones]

I suppose if you take “children” to mean “descendants” and not actual “children” of a household, that would make sense, but why wouldn’t Ezekiel 18:19-20 be informative and basically controlling in the Matt Chandler situation?

I have a hard time seeing the stuff Matt Chandler was describing (a daughter who is either and adult or nearly an adult that is leaving her household against the wishes of her parents, after they tell her to do good and did everything in their power to force her to do good) would prevent him from leading a church.

There are too many Biblical examples of non-chastised rulers who have rebellious underlings for me to take these verses that way. Samuel was still judging Israel after his wicked sons proved themselves wicked, and even after Aaron’s (adult) sons were literally consumed with fire by God for offering strange fire, God still didn’t remove Aaron from his priestly role.

“The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself.” Ezekiel 18:20

As such, I don’t understand why using God’s relationship to his people to be a “category error” when interpreting how leaders in the church should be governed.

[J Caleb Jones @JCalebJones]

Look at the grammar of 1 Timothy 3:4 in Greek and the precise words. The verse does not mandate an outcome: submissive children.

Instead, it is a command to “rule” (προϊστάμενον) well, over your children, with dignity.

Note that the nation of Israel itself is called the firstborn son of God in Exodus 4:22-23 and Hosea 11:1. If the measure is one of outcome for the child and not the leadership for the father, not even God will meet that standard.

To violate 1 Timothy 3:4, you have to have evil leadership. You cannot violate 1 Timothy 3:4 with wicked children.

I haven’t heard anything that Matt Chandler did that was evil.

[J Caleb Jones @JCalebJones]

This is your friendly reminder that everything you see in the news is fake, and there is an alternative motivation for everything that people do in Washington, which is different from what they publicly claim.

Hence, what JD Vance says is true, because it shows that everything you see in the news is fake.

It is also true that he’s saying it wait a particular motivation, which is that Hegseth is a political ally.

The there is nothing wrong with fighting for political allies, but the relevant question is what political allies you fight for.

[JD Vance @JDVance]

Has Pete Hegseth committed impeachable crimes? The question is absurd and the answer is: obviously not.

Like so much of Congress, impeachment has become a ridiculous show that stands in for actual policymaking. Congress has so many tools for registering its policy disagreements. Rather than use them, they're going to try to impeach Pete Hegseth. They did the same to Donald Trump. Legislation is hard. Impeachments are easy (and ultimately, inconsequential).

The irony is that legislators are most angry at Pete on the issues where he's most correct: repositioning forces away from Europe/Ukraine and reorganizing the general officer corps.

This isn't about Iran, this is about the fact that Pete took on the bureaucracy at the Pentagon.

[J Caleb Jones @JCalebJones]

There was a debate on the topic of election.

One side said everything was preordained and there was no way to change anything, so you might as well just accept what has already been determined.

The other side said that we have control over the ultimate outcome and that if we really go out there and do good works, we will be rewarded.

Half the people were talking about the DOCTRINE of election and the other half of the people were talking about electoral POLITICS.

Nobody noticed for several minutes.

[J Caleb Jones @JCalebJones]

@merelyjwright @VA_GOP @MarshaBlackburn @timburchett Virginia?

[J Caleb Jones @JCalebJones]

Ancient History Latitude Comparison:

Rome sits at essentially the same latitude as Chicago (and is only a bit north of New York City).

Athens is at the same latitude as San Francisco.

Sparta is a bit south of San Francisco and lines up closely with San Jose.

Nineveh is at the latitude of Las Vegas and Nashville.

Crete is at roughly the latitude of Oklahoma City (and a bit south of Raleigh).

Damascus is at essentially the same latitude as Phoenix.

Babylon and Susa are at roughly the latitude of San Diego (and a bit south of Dallas).

Jerusalem is at essentially the same latitude as El Paso (Dallas is noticeably farther north).

Alexandria, Egypt, falls between Mobile and New Orleans.

Persepolis is at the latitude of Houston.

Ancient Thebes (modern Luxor) is at the latitude of Miami.

[Ben Shapiro @benshapiro]

Republicans got crushed last night because of three things in combination: unaffordability, chaos, and corruption.

[J Caleb Jones @JCalebJones]

Speaking as someone who has been inside the pro-life movement for decades, I have noticed a surprising lack of genuine, clear thought on abortion issues. This needs to change. What I have observed is a mix of several camps:

1. NGO Pro-lifers. Great networkers, but these are the people who mostly disappeared after Roe fell (or used their networks unwisely), because with Roe going away, their easy and empty “advocacy” task dissolved and the serious legislation, compromise, networking, and lobbying tasks began. I suspect they didn’t even want Roe to fall. Thankfully, they’re few and far between (except in DC).

2. The Feminists. These are the people who think that there are always, ALWAYS “two victims” in an abortion and that women can never be punished for anything that they do in the transaction. It’s a very female-centered and extremely irrational take. Not a winner, except among other pro-life feminists.

3. The Uber-Warriors. These are the people who seem to want a fight and seems to always find one. I’ve seen it in the strange and recent categorical move against IVF, which I know from personal memory was not the default pro-life position. They like to hold signs, but do not like to negotiate legislation, as compromise is seen as defeat and retreat. They are moral absolutists, and can bleed into the “zeal without knowledge” camp.

4. The Talking Point Debaters. These are the people who are very good in one on one conversations with pro-abortion people. Some of them are very good, kind, and persuasive, and have genuine care (Charlie Kirk could be in this category) but others seem to gravitate toward moral high-horses. They (of course) claim that abortion is murder, but cannot seem to fathom that people actually and regularly murder each other, even outside the context of abortion. This prevents them from having real discussions about WHY people are pro-choice, and to what degrees they are pro-choice. They usually have genuine zeal, but they revert to talking points rather than thought when encountering tough issues, which is their weakness.

5. The Boots on the Ground. These are ordinary people on the ground at crisis pregnancy centers. They do good work. Though they also bleed into many other categories, they are salt of the earth and very practical, generous, and loving when doing what they do. No complaints.

There are probably many other categories, but what we don’t have are what I would call “the Professors.”
For example:
- I have never seen someone publicly take even a mildly critical, yet friendly, critique of typical (and quite outdated) pro-life talking points. Yikes.
- I have never seen medical facts OPENLY CONSIDERED (as opposed to used in a debate) in a non-moral absolute way. Why not?
- I have never even heard a pro-life person give a clear list of “these are examples of times where it is (tragically) totally okay to have an abortion to save the life of a mother” in the context of medical emergencies. Why not?
- I have never seen a political compromise on an abortion issue actually described as a “compromise.” This is how life works. So why not?

All of that is absent, and it prevents us from having good, workable, REGULATORY laws on abortion, as opposed to criminal laws on fetal homicide. I think it’s why we’re losing big on state level issues.

Roe was a straw-man codified into bad SCOTUS-dictated law. We need better pro-life thought in the movement. Our mental muscles have atrophied.

[Jon Whitehead @jrwhitehead]

I think the pro-life movement failed to realize the broader coalition that made it possible to reject Roe and still support abortion.

Dobbs was the result of convincing three generations of Republican lawyers that Roe was an offense to the Constitutional system, and the very idea of rule of law — regardless of the life issue.

“Textualism” and “the battle for the Bible” were very similar reactions to very similar moves from mainline liberal Protestantism. The problem, said Robert Bork famously, was that judges no longer treated laws very much like laws.

But the judges in robes were merely applying the same gymnastics to legal texts as their pastors in robes had come to apply in scripture.

The Conservative legal movement succeeded in tying judges to the original public meanings of laws. Many pro-life lawyers supported this move, but so did pro abortion libertarians, and so did business like IBM. Because IBM doesn’t want to be stuck with judges unconstrained by written texts.

There were, of course, GOP politicians who gave lip service to pro-lifers — the kind of politicians who knew pro lifers would vote to give the IBMs conservative judges. Convictional prolife GOPers used to be extremely rare.

On the one hand, there has been a concerning shift post Dobbs. Trump is obviously less personally prolife than Bush, for sure. But people need to understand there were *so many* Trump-like figures in the anti-Roe coalition all along.

[J Caleb Jones @JCalebJones]

If our memory goes back to October 25, 2023, we would be able to recall that Mike Johnson barely even sought to be the speaker.

He only arose as a nominee on the fourth ballot after Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan, and Tom Emmer failed to become speaker. He beat Byron Donalds.

Did he have stellar leadership? No. But I don’t blame him for what happened in the position he reluctantly inherited.

I’ll just compliment him for knowing when to step out.

[Jake Sherman @JakeSherman]

🚨🚨BREAKING NEWS -- MIKE JOHNSON will not run for House minority leader.

He just said it on the staff call.

[J Caleb Jones @JCalebJones]

@Cernovich Hegseth was given a crappy war and he did fairly well in it.

The people who gave it to him are to blame.

[Mike Benz @MikeBenzCyber]

Frankly, Republicans got off easy. A lesson was delivered on what happens when you stray too far from your base. Your base leaves. Now, the base must be won back. It's better to learn this lesson now than in 2028, when losing will give Democrats the Justice Department & the FBI.

[J Caleb Jones @JCalebJones]

Tell me you didn’t learn the right lesson without telling me that you didn’t learn the right lesson.

[Joel Berry @JoelWBerry]

Young white men voted overwhelmingly for gay race communists who want to trans kids, flood the country with illegals, and destroy young white men.

Online social contagions of conspiracism, victimhood, and Jew-hatred are largely to blame.

[J Caleb Jones @JCalebJones]

Almost no natural person was upset about tariffs. That’s because tariffs didn’t affect almost all natural persons and voters in America.

Tariffs raised the prices of things that most people are too poor to buy anyway because gas and rent and everything else is ridiculously expensive. They were basically non-issues for most voters, unless you were building a building or buying new consumer electronic equipment.

To the extent that they did have any effect on actual people, it was in the category of bananas going from 49¢ per pound to 69¢ per pound. So, basically nothing.

But corporate persons were EXTREMELY upset about tariffs BECAUSE THATS WHOSE POCKETBOOK THEY HURT.

And so if you see someone complaining about tariffs, realize that it is a corporate person who is complaining, even if it comes through the mouth of a natural person.

[Kimberley Strassel @KimStrassel]

This is a total hoot.
About the only thing it gets correct is that 2024 Trump voters were "pissed." As the polls spell out, very clearly, they were angry about tariffs--a word weirdly not found in this post, but which exit polls showed 65% of voters dislike. There's a straight line between those punishing costs and Senate losses in Kansas, Iowa, Ohio (farm areas) and beyond.
Angry the WH instead spent this past year talking about ballrooms and the Kennedy center. Frustrated by the complete absence of a next-two-year agenda (85% are concerned by healthcare costs. Where is the GOP plan?)
They are also unhappy about the war, though the numbers might be different if the president been clear about an exit strategy. And not sure where the "smartest" (and most anonymous) pollster in the world got the Israel argument. Exit polls show that of the 51% of voters who said our support for Israel was "too strong," only 19% of even that subset of respondents were Republican. The vast majority of GOP voters said our support for Israel was "just right" or "not strong enough."
Amusing to claim the problem here was traditional conservatives, as they were sidelined. Tillis was run out of the party, dooming NC. As was Cornyn. The WH had a pure expression of its second-term Trump/Vance agenda and loyalty in its chosen candidate of Ken Paxton. That would be the smoking carcass sitting on a 12-point loss in. . . Texas of all places. Meanwhile, who exactly is even talking about "asylum"? That's just a smear-y effort to preemptively shut down valid criticism.
The GOP strength has always been in its coalition--free-marketers, defense hawks, cultural conservatives. Trump's first-term success came from largely following that Reagan playbook. The second-term leaned into me-too progressive populism--at the veep's urging--and it ain't working.
The weird thing is that the veep remains more obsessed with remaking the party than with winning. Winning will require a lot better understanding of what happened yesterday than what is on offer in this alternate-universe view.

[J Caleb Jones @JCalebJones]

Oh…. My……

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

Bo French got more votes for Texas Railroad Commissioner than Paxton did for Senate…

🔴French - 4,426,545 (+176,793)
🔴Paxton - 4,249,752

He also matched Abbott’s vote share.

[J Caleb Jones @JCalebJones]

@ericmetaxas Not a good look, bro.

[J Caleb Jones @JCalebJones]

@JoelWebbon I am begging you to never go with this camera angle ever again.

[J Caleb Jones @JCalebJones]

Come on, Brit. This sounds indistinguishable an Israeli citizen:

“Hitting the regime that has waged war on us for 47 years was right and four decades overdue. What voters watched afterward was the goal line surrender, a so called deal championed by the appeaser Vance, who stood at Lake Lucerne praising the framework as the foundation for a final agreement while it waived Iran's oil sanctions and released $12 billion in frozen assets to a regime left standing, with our forces still taking fire in the strait. The failure is not that we fought. The failure is that we paid the enemy and called it peace while they still shoot at us to this day.”

I wasted my time reading this.

[J Caleb Jones @JCalebJones]

This is the way.

Just start telling the truth.

[JD Vance @JDVance]

One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.

So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."

Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.

There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.

But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.

Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:

1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel

Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)

In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.

The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.

If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.

But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.

I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

This is maybe the most thorough and honest diagnosis of an election defeat that we’ve ever seen from a politician at Vance’s level. And he’s right.