Rachel Motte

Writer and editor. Proud @BiolaU and @torreyhonors alum. Reagan Conservative. Catholic convert. I work at @cosmo_globalist. RTs & likes are not endorsements.

[Mere Orthodoxy @mereorthodoxy]

The Ancient World Had No Word for Child Abuse
https://t.co/vMlFGrLcAe

[Rachel Motte @RachelMotte]

Amen.

[Tod Worner @ThinkerCatholic]

What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.
—Flannery O’Connor

[Nervana Mahmoud @Nervana_1]

The leaked draft of a potential Iran-US deal is alarming to say the least

1. Vaguely worded clauses that lack clear legal precision.

2. It is unclear whether all remaining regime top names are in agreement.

3. No mention of stopping attacks on U.S. allies regional allies like UAE

4. The draft ignores any mention of ballistic missiles, drones, or proxies.

5. It’s unclear whether Israel would agree to such a deal.

So disappointing

[Raja Muneeb @RajaMuneeb]

A Suicide bomber blows himself up in Algeria’s Blida Province during Pope's visit.

[Ross Douthat @DouthatNYT]

For the would-be Great Man of History, the final boss is always the pope.

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

The statements made by President Trump on Truth Social regarding the Pope were entirely inappropriate and disrespectful. They don’t contribute at all to a constructive conversation. It is the Pope’s prerogative to articulate Catholic doctrine and the principles that govern the moral life. In regard to the concrete application of those principles, people of good will can and do disagree. I would warmly recommend that serious Catholics within the Trump administration–Secretary Rubio, Vice President Vance, Ambassador Brian Burch, and others–might meet with Vatican officials so that a real dialogue can take place. This is far preferable to the statements on social media.

I am very grateful for the many ways that the Trump administration has reached out to Catholics and other people of faith. It has been a high honor to serve on the Religious Liberty Commission. No President in my lifetime has shown a greater dedication to defending our first liberty. All that said, I think the President owes the Pope an apology.

[Jonathan Karl @jonkarl]

This morning, I asked President Trump if he’s okay with the Iranians charging a toll for all ships that go through the Strait of Hormuz, he told me there may be a Joint US-Iran venture to charge tolls:

“We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It’s a way of securing it — also securing it from lots of other people.”

“It’s a beautiful thing”

[Rachel Motte @RachelMotte]

What Bernard Lewis saw in Iran https://t.co/6a3OtXdqKO

[Rachel Motte @RachelMotte]

Can Israel fight on? by @MindyBelz https://t.co/ZyYSU5OrKo

[Shay Khatiri @ShayKhatiri]

I AM GOING TO BE EXTREMELY PETTY. SO SIT TIGHT!

Four years ago, I published a Substack post that the future of Iran would be civil war. As far as I know, nobody else had touched the topic. I wrote a few pieces about this (which nobody wanted to publish) over the next few years. The feedback ranged from dismissing them to mocking me to telling me to shut up (by the diaspora).

Now, suddenly, everybody's worried about a civil war in Iran, but nobody has gone back to see who was talking about this before. What is the point of them all? To say that the civil war would be the fault of Trump and Israel. A few things:

1. The regime spent the 2010s telling Iranians that "we'd turn Iran into Syria if you try to get rid of us." The regime created the conditions for a civil war on purpose.

2. Since I have been predicting this before any knowledge/hope that we'd attack Iran, I believe that, if a civil war happens, the war will have triggered it. But without the war, there would have been another trigger, especially Khamenei's death of natural casues.

3. If you are actually interested in this topic, as opposed to writing hit-pieces to blame Trump and Israel, please feel free to reach out to me.

4. Shame on all the editors who rejected my previous drafts on the issue because they thought I was being hyperbolic, leaving the policy class intellectually behind on this topic.

[Dan Senor @dansenor]

You wouldn’t know any of this from reading much of the mainstream press coverage of the war.

[Rachel Motte @RachelMotte]

@AlbertoMiguelF5 Loved hearing you on Guadalupe Radio this morning!

[Owen Lewis @is_OwenLewis]

We’ve all pictured those “pristine” primeval forests: dark, dense, closed-canopy woodlands stretching forever, the kind that supposedly ruled the continent before humans showed up. But a major new study out of Aarhus University (just published in Biological Conservation) says that’s actually a modern invention.

By stitching together 23 million years of evidence — pollen records, ancient DNA, herbivore fossils, fire charcoal, stable isotopes, the works — the researchers show Europe’s natural state was a sun dappled mosaic: open woodlands mixed with grasslands, scrub, and wildflower meadows. Huge grazers like elephants, rhinos, aurochs, and bison kept things light and dynamic, exactly the kind of habitat most European species evolved in.

Dense, dark forests? They only became widespread relatively recently, after those megafauna disappeared and traditional grazing faded away.

The implications are huge for today’s reforestation push. Subsidies for planting uniform, thick forests (for carbon and “rewilding”) might actually be working against biodiversity and the continent’s history. The lead scientists put it bluntly: we need more mosaics and living herbivores doing the landscaping, not just rows of trees.

Science keeps busting myths and handing us better tools to actually restore what nature really wants. Another reminder that progress comes from following the evidence, not the postcard version of the past.

What do you think — time to update European forest policy?

📸 Credit: Márton Zsoldos

Source: https://t.co/5ixgjyaSBG

[Shay Khatiri @ShayKhatiri]

Students for Justice in Palestine and communists came to protest the war against Iran. Iranian students, supported by their Jewish brothers and sisters, counterprotested to support the war. Nature is healing!

[Shay Khatiri @ShayKhatiri]

So Israel wiped Ahmadinejad off the map?

P.S. Non-trivial chance that the regime killed him.

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

To call classical education “inherently right wing” is to rewrite history. The left–right divide itself is a modern invention, born in the French Revolution. Long before that, the great works of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, and Shakespeare shaped entire civilizations without fitting into any partisan category. In fact, many of the greatest minds in the tradition were not considered “conservative” in their own day. They were groundbreaking, disruptive, and sometimes even regarded as dangerous. Socrates was condemned for corrupting the youth.. Dante critiqued popes and emperors alike. Far from being a right-wing artifact, classical education has always transcended politics, forming men and women across the spectrum. Only in very recent decades has the left abandoned the inheritance it once proudly claimed, leaving the guardianship of Homer and Virgil, of Shakespeare and Milton, to those still willing to defend the best of what has been thought and said.

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

I’m personally conservative. But classical education isn’t conservative or liberal. It’s human.

Every parent wants their kids shaped by the greatest stories ever told. Every parent wants them to grow in honesty, courage, and respect. Every parent wants them to know the difference between beauty and ugliness, truth and lies.

This isn’t about ideology. It isn’t nostalgia. It’s about giving the next generation the education that forms the whole person.

Classical education isn’t partisan. It’s universal. It belongs to everyone.

[Spencer Hakimian @SpencerHakimian]

Since Inauguration Day, the Dollar has lost -13% of its value.

[Rachel Motte @RachelMotte]

Uh oh.

[Yaroslav Trofimov @yarotrof]

Estonia says Russian fighter jets were in its airspace for 12 minutes before they were politely escorted out. A Russian jet lasted a fraction of that in Turkish airspace in 2015. And somehow Russia stopped violating Turkish airspace after that.

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

The problem with the “Remember, Democrats could abuse this power too when they’re in charge again” argument isn’t that it is wrong. It’s that it misses the fact that abusing power when your team is in charge is simply wrong on the merits. The same applies to “well, they abused power when they were in charge before, so it’s our turn now.”

Both arguments concede that what your team is doing is objectively wrong. But the latter argument literally turns the most offensive standards of your opponents into your own.