Steve Mooney

Husband, father, technologist, coach, pastor. Advocate of free speech, rational debate, and kindness.

[Secretary Kennedy @SecKennedy]

Sheryl. Your article exemplifies the biased reporting we have come to expect from you and @nytimes. It was unfair, inimical, and inaccurate. All one needs to refute your argument is to glance at my publicly available calendar and to review my unprecedented list of accomplishments on a wide range of issues, all of which I drove. You evidently never undertook these foundational due diligences. Why let facts obscure a good story?

You fault me for missing a couple of monthly counselor meetings. However, I meet one-on-one with my counselors every day to decide policy and strategy. We schedule the monthly meetings to give the divisions a chance to keep each other informed about HHS-wide policies with which I’m already intimately familiar. Had you read my calendar, you would have seen that I have back-to-back meetings all day, every day, with both career and political staff, with my counselors and with outside stakeholders, interspersed with press conferences and other policy announcements.

I am knowledgeable and active on every issue in every division of my department, and I always make the final decisions. I meet with the principals at FDA, NIH, CDC, and my senior counselor every morning, something, I’m told, is unprecedented in HHS history. I try to get out of the office between 4:30 and 6:00 PM, so that I can spend three hours, in quiet, responding to emails. I normally work until 11 PM every night, mostly on phone calls to staff.

In order to prove your preconceived case for my disengagement, you quote anonymous employees, some of whom I fired or who quit to avoid being fired. You also deceptively quote HHS employees without identifying whether they were among those I fired, thereby depriving your readers of the opportunity to make an independent judgment about their credibility.

I came into this job to change the culture of a broken agency that has presided over the worst decline in public health in American history. Of course I fired people—lots of them! It's an easy task for even the laziest journalist, to comb that flotsam and jetsam for malevolence toward the Trump administration. And of course, this species of journalist will always be able to find disgruntled individuals among the 70,000 employees of the Department from whom to cherry pick "facts" to flesh out a preordained hit piece. All that is required for this brand of journalism is the ethical elasticity that you seem to have in spades. You had a preconceived thesis, and you set out to prove it. This is a widely accepted technique in journalism today, but I grew up in an era when it would not have been tolerated by the New York Times.

Ultimately, God puts us all on this earth to search for existential truths. I've tried to instill this mission at HHS by implementing gold standard research to end the regime of politicized science that COVID exposed to the American public. There was a time that journalists were proud to be the fearless and uncompromising champions of truth. Standards have devolved, and journalism is dead. The Times now employs propagandists. Your capitulation to partisanship further compounds your journalistic challenges; since we all are aware of your predictable bias, we at HHS are unwilling to talk to you about the topics that are important. The fact that you have minimal access to decision makers leaves you covering trivia and relying on your own capacity for invention.

Btw. When I took this job, the building was empty. About 90% of the employees were not coming to work. I changed that, but your newspaper never covers my reforms. Nor did you cover the fact that my predecessor almost never showed up for work here during his four years in office. When we came in, there were still artifacts from the first Trump administration in many of our office drawers because no one showed up for work during the Biden years. Just as Rochelle Walensky spent her entire term as CDC Director in Cambridge, Xavier Becerra reportedly spent most of his term as HHS Secretary in California. (I live in California, but I’ve only been there once in fifteen months).

His only notable accomplishments here were losing 300,000 children, referred to HHS for custody and care, to human traffickers and drug runners, encouraging transgender surgeries, and disabling the entire program-integrity apparatus, allowing hundreds of billions of dollars of theft from my agency. I have set out to find the children Becerra lost. He is now the front-runner for the governor of California. These are not invented stories; they are genuine scandals that the Times will never cover, presumably, because the malefactors are Democrats.

Finally, you criticize me for spending time with the Indian tribes in Alaska. I consider that part of my job. I run the Indian Health Services, and I’ve had unprecedented success in transforming IHS from a backwater to a top priority for this department. I’ve made more trips to Indian country and to Indian health clinics and hospitals than any HHS secretary in history, and I’ve brought Indians into high positions on the sixth floor for the first time in agency history. This is another success story that the Times will never cover.

[Wall Street Journal Opinion @WSJopinion]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of prominent scientists challenged the prevailing government approach to lockdowns. The Lockdown Dissidents tells the story of researchers who say they were censored when they questioned the public health consensus. https://t.co/DSWzXKE7Lj

[JD Vance @JDVance]

Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit. His murder is as tragic as it is enraging. He should still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.

Henry was far from the first to so needlessly lose his life, and I fear he won’t be the last. Each time a life like his is lost, the proper response—the only response—is righteous anger. One of the most important things the Trump administration has proven to the world is that stopping the flow of mass migration and defending national sovereignty is a matter of political will and leadership. Anything else is an excuse.

It is because we love the West that we want to preserve it. We love our civilization. We love our country. We love our children. And nobody—nobody—should ever die the way that Henry Nowak died. May God comfort those who loved him, and may God rest his soul.

[Art @ZarkFiles]

The E. Jean Carroll case against President Trump is one of the strangest civil cases in American history. The foundational problem is this: Carroll could not identify when the alleged incident occurred — not even the year with any precision.
That should have killed the case as dead as a skunk on the road right there.
Without a temporal anchor, no defendant — regardless of guilt or innocence — can mount an alibi defense. Trump, who has maintained detailed calendars and staff records for decades, was denied the most basic tool of self-defense: the ability to establish where he was. That is not a technicality. It is a due process violation at the constitutional level.
Then Carroll produced the one piece of physical evidence she claimed corroborated her account — the dress she wore during the alleged incident. It was subsequently established that the dress was designed after the incident could have occurred. The sole corroborating evidence falsified her timeline.
The case proceeded anyway.
The resulting verdict was then weaponized in a defamation suit — where Trump was held liable for denying the allegation, while being procedurally barred from defending against it, because it was already "proven" in another court, regardless how flawed the procedure was. He was punished, in effect, for asserting his own innocence.
Compounding everything: coordinated professional and physical threats so thoroughly intimidated the legal community that attorneys refused these cases regardless of available fees. When you systematically destroy a defendant's ability to retain counsel of choice, you forfeit the right to a legitimate verdict.
An allegation is not evidence. Process without substance is not law. And a verdict produced under these conditions carries no legitimate authority — whatever its formal status.

Not only is it the right move to investigate Carroll, but every other person involved as well. Trump is owed serious damages here, and there may be a few people who belong in prison for their roles in the case.

[Mark Kaplan @markkaplan20]

My statin thread reached over 460,000 people. Thousands of you asked the same question.

"If cholesterol does not cause heart disease, then what does?"

The answer has been published for years. In the largest risk factor study ever conducted. 27,939 women. 21 years. Published in JAMA Cardiology.

Here is what they found. And here is why nobody told you.

🧵

[Handre @Handre]

The Soviet whaling fleet killed 180,000 whales between 1948 and 1973, delivering rotten carcasses that nobody wanted to eat. Soviet citizens had zero demand for whale meat. The ships hunted anyway, fulfilling quotas handed down from central planners who counted tons of dead whale as economic output.

This was bureaucratic box-checking that nearly drove multiple whale species to extinction. Soviet whalers targeted endangered right whales and humpbacks specifically because they were larger, helping them hit tonnage targets faster. The meat rotted on deck during long voyages back to port, where officials dutifully recorded the numbers and sent reports to Moscow declaring another successful harvest.

Central planners measured success in tons harvested, not consumer satisfaction or long-term sustainability. Factory managers got promoted for exceeding whale quotas, regardless of whether anyone actually wanted whale meat (they didn't). The feedback mechanism that normally connects production to human needs had been severed entirely. When bureaucrats replace market prices with administrative targets, you get mass slaughter with zero purpose.

You still see this today every time politicians promise to "create jobs" in industries that lose money year after year. When government agencies measure their success by dollars spent rather than problems solved. When university administrators chase enrollment numbers instead of student outcomes.

Remove the profit motive and price signals, and you get 180,000 dead whales rotting in the sun while commissars celebrate meeting their targets. You don't get rational planning.

Socialism is fundamentally destructive to the environment and inevitably leads to ecological disasters.

[Dan Burmawi @DanBurmawy]

Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi and one of the architects of the Holocaust, fled to South America after World War II.

In 1962, he was captured and brought to Israel for trial.

During the proceedings, the prosecution brought in survivors from Nazi death camps to testify against him.

One of them, Yehiel Dinur, entered the courtroom and came face to face with Eichmann, who was seated in a glass box. The moment Dinur saw him, he collapsed to the ground, shaking and sobbing uncontrollably.

Years later, in an interview with 60 Minutes, journalist Mike Wallace asked Dinur if his reaction had been caused by traumatic memories from the concentration camps.

"No," Dinur replied. "It was not the memories that made me collapse. It was the realization that Eichmann was not a demon. He was an ordinary man.

Hannah Arendt, a journalist for The New Yorker, attended Eichmann’s trial and later wrote about it.

She noted that Eichmann was not a psychopath, not a man burning with sadistic hatred. He was ordinary.

That is what made him so terrifying. He was a man who followed orders, who did his job, who justified the horrors he participated in without ever questioning them.

All humans have the capacity for evil. We all have within us the ability to justify unspeakable horrors if the conditions are right.

The question is not whether we are capable of evil, but what prevents us from committing it?

Most religions restrain human evil. They set moral boundaries, condemning acts of violence, injustice, and cruelty.

Christianity commands its followers to love their enemies, forgive those who harm them, and refuse vengeance.

Judaism, despite its history of persecution, never formed a doctrine commanding global conquest or the extermination of non-Jews.

Islam, however, does the opposite.

When an ISIS fighter beheads a captive, he is not acting outside the teachings of his faith. He is following the example of Muhammad, who personally oversaw the beheading of hundreds of Jewish men in Medina.

When Hamas terrorists slaughter Israeli families, they are not betraying Islam, they are fulfilling the doctrine of jihad, which commands war against non-Muslims until Islam dominates the world.

Unlike Christianity, which calls for self-sacrifice, Islam calls for sacrificing others. Unlike Judaism, which focuses on preserving its own people, Islam commands the subjugation or destruction of all who reject it.

We all have the potential for evil. But the difference between a person who commits atrocities and one who does not is the belief system that shapes them.

A Christian who commits murder is violating his faith. A Muslim who kills an apostate is fulfilling his.

A Buddhist who wages war is going against the teachings of his religion. A jihadist who slaughters unbelievers is doing exactly what his religion commands.

The Nazis did not commit genocide because they were born different from us. They did it because they were indoctrinated into an ideology that justified mass murder.

The same is true for every Hamas terrorist, every suicide bomber, every ISIS militant.

Their faith tells them that their victims are not innocent, not human, not worthy of mercy. And so, they kill without hesitation.

The reality is, Islam is the only major religion that actively commands the atrocities we fear. It is the only faith where genocide, subjugation, and violence are not historical accidents, but divine commandments.

It is a mistake to think Islam is just another religion, rather than the most dangerous ideology the world has ever known.

[Angie Wong @angiewong]

I just want to personally thank Mayor Zohran Mamdani for scaring away the billionaire class from NYC and helping bring billions in tax revenue to my district of Brickell Miami, where Ken Griffin’s Citadel is building its massive Class A office tower next to my office and bringing thousands of high earning professionals to the area.

The economic shift into Downtown Miami is truly transformative. Billions in new investments, new jobs, new infrastructure, and a growing tax base can help fund schools, transportation, and the modernization of Miami as it evolves into the new Wall Street of America. Keep the expats coming! @ZohranKMamdani #kengriffen #citadel #miami

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Elon Musk avait dit un truc qui m'avait marqué sur l'allocation de ressources. En substance : passé un certain niveau de richesse, l'argent n'est plus de la consommation, c'est de l'allocation de capital.

Cette phrase change tout.

L'économie, dans le fond, c'est juste un problème d'allocation. Tu as des ressources finies et des usages infinis. Qui décide où va quoi ?

Imagine une cour de récré. 100 enfants, des paquets de cartes Pokémon distribués au hasard. Tu laisses faire. Très vite, un ordre émerge. Les bons joueurs accumulent les cartes rares, les collectionneurs trient, les négociateurs trouvent des deals. Personne n'a planifié. Et pourtant chaque carte finit dans les mains de celui qui en tire le plus de valeur. Le système maximise le bonheur total de la cour. C'est ça, la main invisible.

Maintenant fais entrer la maîtresse. Elle trouve ça injuste. Léo a 50 cartes, Tom en a 3. Elle confisque, redistribue, impose l'égalité. Trois effets immédiats. Les bons joueurs arrêtent de jouer, à quoi bon. Les mauvais n'ont plus de raison de progresser, ils auront leur part. Les échanges s'effondrent. La cour est égale, et morte. Elle a maximisé l'égalité, elle a détruit le bonheur.

Le problème de la maîtresse, c'est qu'elle ne peut pas avoir l'information que la cour avait collectivement. C'est le problème du calcul économique de Mises, formulé en 1920. L'URSS a essayé de le résoudre pendant 70 ans avec le Gosplan. Résultat : pénuries, queues, effondrement. Pas parce que les Soviétiques étaient bêtes, parce que le problème est mathématiquement insoluble en mode centralisé.

Quand Musk a 200 milliards, il ne les consomme pas, il les alloue. SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, xAI. Chaque dollar est un pari sur le futur. Et lui a un track record. PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX. Il a démontré qu'il sait identifier des problèmes immenses et y allouer des ressources avec un rendement spectaculaire.

L'État aussi a un track record. Hôpitaux qui s'effondrent, éducation qui décline, dette qui explose, services publics qui se dégradent malgré des budgets en hausse constante. Le marché identifie les bons allocateurs, la politique identifie les bons communicants.

Le profit n'est pas une finalité, c'est un signal. Il dit : tu as alloué des ressources rares vers un usage que les gens valorisent suffisamment pour payer. Plus le profit est gros, plus la création de valeur est grande. Quand Starlink est rentable, ça veut dire que des millions de gens dans des zones rurales ont enfin internet. Quand un ministère est en déficit, ça veut dire qu'il consomme plus qu'il ne produit. L'un crée, l'autre détruit, et on appelle ça redistribution.

Dans nos sociétés il y a deux catégories d'acteurs. Les entrepreneurs et les bureaucrates. L'entrepreneur prend un risque personnel pour identifier un problème, mobiliser des ressources, créer une solution. S'il se trompe il perd. S'il a raison, ses clients gagnent, ses employés gagnent, ses fournisseurs gagnent, l'État collecte des impôts. Il est la cellule de base du progrès humain.

Le bureaucrate ne prend aucun risque personnel. Son salaire est garanti. Au mieux il maintient une rente existante. Au pire il la détruit par excès de réglementation, mauvaise allocation forcée, incitations perverses qui découragent ceux qui produisent. Mais dans aucun cas il ne crée.

Regarde les 50 dernières années. iPhone, internet civil, SpaceX, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Stripe, mRNA, ChatGPT. Toutes des inventions privées, portées par des entrepreneurs, financées par du capital risque. Pas un seul ministère n'a inventé quoi que ce soit qui ait changé ta vie au quotidien.

La France est devenue le laboratoire mondial de la dérive bureaucratique. 57% du PIB en dépenses publiques, record absolu. Une administration tentaculaire, une fiscalité qui pénalise la création de richesse. Résultat : décrochage face aux États-Unis, à l'Allemagne, à la Suisse. Fuite des cerveaux. Désindustrialisation. Dette qui explose.

Et le pire c'est que la mauvaise allocation s'auto-renforce. Plus l'État prélève, moins les entrepreneurs créent. Moins ils créent, moins il y a de base fiscale. Plus l'État s'endette et taxe. Boucle de rétroaction négative parfaite. La maîtresse pense qu'elle aide, et chaque année la cour produit moins.

Dans nos sociétés, ce sont les entrepreneurs, toujours, qui font avancer la civilisation. Les bureaucrates au mieux maintiennent une rente, au pire la détruisent. Aucune société n'a jamais progressé en taxant ses créateurs pour subventionner ses gestionnaires.

La question n'est jamais qui a combien. C'est qui alloue le mieux la prochaine unité de ressource pour maximiser le futur de l'humanité. La réponse depuis 200 ans n'a jamais changé. Ce ne sont pas les fonctionnaires.

[Clifton Duncan @cliftonaduncan]

The "Hate Has No Home Here" crowd keeps trying to kill people.

[Josh Howerton @howertonjosh]

Political violence is a feature, not a bug of progressivism.

Because progressivism is built on top of a Critical Theory lens that sees the world through "Oppressed vs Oppressor" categories rather than a Christian Theology lens of "Right vs Wrong", it trains people to see opponents not as mistaken, but as evil oppressors.

If you believe someone is mistaken, you try to persuade them (what @charliekirk11 did).

If you believe someone is an evil oppressor ("literally Hitler!", "fascist", "existential threat to democracy", virtually everything and everyone is "racist"), you will feel a moral obligation to stop them.

This is why there is radically disproportionate violence emerging on the Left.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

So @grok, we all just discovered that the SPLC has allegedly been funding some of the worst of the people and groups it claims to oppose. What are other activist pressure groups that advocate censorship/deplatforming of their enemies that could be doing the same thing?

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The year is 1950. Your doctor lights a cigarette and tells you smoking is fine. He read it in a study. He is telling the truth about having read it. He does not know, or is not saying, that the study was funded by the tobacco industry.

The year is 1958. Your doctor tells you to eat less fat. The evidence is contested. The contestation is not in the public messaging. The food industry has been helpful in clarifying which findings deserve attention. Some researchers who published contradictory data have been quietly defunded. Ancel Keys is on the cover of Time magazine.

The year is 1962. Your doctor prescribes thalidomide to your pregnant wife for morning sickness. It has been approved. The FDA gave it the green light in Europe. Twelve thousand children will be born with severe limb malformations before anyone in an official capacity acknowledges the problem. The families are told the drug was safe. The drug was approved. Both of these things remain true.

The year is 1972. Your doctor prescribes Valium. Britain is in the grip of a benzodiazepine wave that will last two decades. The dependency risk is known internally. It is not shared. Your doctor is not lying to you. He was not told either.

The year is 1999. Your doctor prescribes Vioxx for your arthritis. It is newer than ibuprofen, well-tolerated, and Merck has a study showing it works. Merck also has internal data suggesting it roughly doubles the risk of heart attack. This data will not reach your doctor for four more years. Fifty thousand people are estimated to have died in the interim. Merck eventually settles for 4.85 billion dollars. No criminal charges are brought.

The year is 2002. Your doctor prescribes OxyContin. Purdue Pharma trained its sales representatives to tell doctors the addiction risk was less than one percent. That figure came from a letter, not a study. The letter was about patients with terminal cancer on short-term doses in hospital settings. Your doctor is a GP with a patient who has a bad back. Nobody draws a distinction. Nobody is required to.

The year is 2008. Your doctor checks your cholesterol. Your LDL is elevated. You are prescribed a statin. Nobody mentions that the number needed to treat for primary prevention is approximately 250. Nobody mentions that the muscle deterioration you'll notice over the next two years is listed as a rare side effect rather than a documented pattern affecting a meaningful percentage of patients. The trial that informed the prescription was funded by the manufacturer.

Now it is today.

Your doctor has new guidelines. New studies. New consensus.

He is confident.

He has always been confident.

The confidence has never been the problem.

The confidence is, in fact, precisely the problem.

[Daniel Black🦎 @Dani_Activist]

I used to think Christians were naive. I thought faith in God was just an emotional crutch for people who could not handle reality.

Now I think the opposite.

The more seriously I looked at life, history, suffering, conscience, beauty, evil, and the limits of human reason, the less convincing atheism became.

Because everyone has faith. Everyone. The only real question is where that faith is placed.

In God, or in man.

I was taught that intelligence means distance from God. But what is so intelligent about believing that matter somehow produced mind, that chaos somehow produced order, that chemistry somehow produced conscience, and that human beings can ground morality by themselves while constantly contradicting even their own standards?

If we are only matter, then human dignity is just a useful story. Love is chemistry. Evil is preference. Sacrifice is irrational. Meaning is self invented. But almost no one actually lives that way. We all live as if truth matters, as if cruelty is really wrong, as if beauty means something, as if love is more than a chemical reaction, and as if justice should exist even when it costs us.

That is not nothing. That points beyond survival.

The Bible understood this long before modern people started pretending they had outgrown it.

Genesis grounds human dignity in the image of God. That means people are not valuable because they are productive, attractive, healthy, or useful. They are valuable because they bear His image.

John 1 does not begin with chaos. It begins with the Logos. Reason, order, meaning. Reality is not random noise. It is intelligible because it comes from a mind greater than ours.

Ecclesiastes says that pleasure, work, success, and achievement collapse into vanity when cut off from God. Anyone who has chased status, money, sex, or recognition long enough knows how true that is.

Romans 1 says creation points beyond itself. And it does. The order of the world, the mathematical beauty of reality, the existence of consciousness, the hunger for meaning, the presence of moral knowledge, these are not small things.

And history teaches the same lesson. The bloodiest experiments of the last century did not come from too much faith in God. They came from man trying to replace God with ideology, state, race, class, or power. When God is removed, something else always takes His place. Usually something crueler.

Christianity also does not begin with a vague spiritual feeling. It makes a historical claim. That Christ entered history, was crucified, and rose again. You can reject that claim, but it is not the same as saying faith is just blind comfort. Christianity stands or falls on what it says actually happened.

So no, I no longer think faith in God is stupid.

I think one of the most shallow ideas modern people were ever sold is that disbelief is automatically intelligent.

Sometimes disbelief is not depth. Sometimes it is pride.

And sometimes faith is not an escape from reality. It is what remains when you look at reality honestly enough and realize that man is not enough, matter is not enough, and this world cannot explain itself.

I used to think Christians were foolish.

Now I think many of them simply saw earlier what I was too proud to see.

[Eitan Fischberger @EFischberger]

Here's how Muslim-majority countries treat their Christian populations:

🇸🇴 SOMALIA
No churches exist. Converts from Islam face death. Al-Shabaab is committed to eradicating Christianity entirely.

🇾🇪 YEMEN
Christians can be imprisoned, tortured, or killed. Possessing a Bible in Houthi-controlled areas is dangerous. No legal protection for Christians exists.

🇸🇩 SUDAN
Over 100 churches have been damaged or destroyed. Christians have been abducted and killed. Islamist extremists operate with impunity.

🇸🇾 SYRIA
Now largely controlled by HTS — an Islamic extremist group with roots in Al-Qaeda. Christian population has collapsed from 1.5 million to 300,000.

🇳🇬 NIGERIA
More Christians are killed for their faith in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world. Boko Haram, ISWAP, and Fulani militias operate freely. The government has largely failed to prosecute perpetrators.

🇵🇰 PAKISTAN
🔸 Christians are 1.8% of the population but absorb ~25% of blasphemy accusations — which carry a death sentence.

🔸 Mob lynchings of accused Christians are common. Entire Christian neighborhoods have been torched.

🔸 Christian girls are kidnapped, forcibly converted, and married off. Courts often back the perpetrators.

🇱🇾 LIBYA
No functioning government to protect Christians. Foreign Christians are kidnapped and killed by Islamist groups. No legal protections exist.

🇮🇷 IRAN
🔸 96 Christians sentenced to 263 years in prison in 2024 alone — a sixfold increase year-over-year.

🔸 House churches are raided. Converts are charged with espionage and "enmity against God."

🔸 Apostasy is punishable by death. Government's stated goal: eradicate the Persian-speaking Church.

🇦🇫 AFGHANISTAN
Christians face death if discovered. No public Christian communities exist. The Taliban is actively working to erase any Christian presence.

🇸🇦 SAUDI ARABIA
🔸 No churches allowed. No public Christian worship of any kind.

🔸 Apostasy and proselytizing are capital offenses under Sharia law.

🔸 Bibles are confiscated. Even private worship by expatriates can result in arrest and deportation.

🇲🇱 MALI / 🇧🇫 BURKINA FASO
Pastors executed, churches burned, villages massacred. Governments have lost control of large swaths of territory to jihadist groups including Boko Haram and JNIM.

🇮🇶 IRAQ
The Christian population has collapsed from 1.2 million in 2011 to just 120,000 in 2024 — driven by ISIS genocide. Christians are described as "close to extinction."

🇩🇿 ALGERIA
All 47 Protestant evangelical churches in the country have been shut down. Converting Muslims is a criminal offense.

🇲🇷 MAURITANIA
Apostasy is punishable by death. No churches exist for Mauritanian citizens.

🇲🇦 MOROCCO
No public Christian worship permitted. Converting from Islam can result in prosecution. Foreign missionaries are expelled.

🇶🇦 QATAR
🔸 Apostasy: death penalty under Sharia law.

🔸 Proselytizing a Muslim: up to 5 years in prison.

🔸 Bringing Christian materials into the country: up to 2 years in prison.

🇹🇷 TURKEY
🔸 200+ Christian workers expelled since 2020, labeled "national security threats."

🔸 No legal training of clergy permitted. The historic Halki Seminary remains closed.

🔸 Christian population has collapsed from 20% to 0.2% over the past century.

[Nancy Pearcey @NancyRPearcey]

How Christianity ended slavery:

"Many people fail to realize that virtually every society has had slaves — from the Chinese to the Arabs to the Native Americans.

In fact, there is only one worldview that gave rise to moral opposition to slavery — namely, Christianity.

The first person to offer a moral and logical argument against slavery as an institution was a church father writing in the 4th century: Gregory of Nyssa argued explicitly on the ground that all persons are in the likeness of God — and therefore, he said, no one has a right to buy or sell another person.

In the Middle Ages, Christians made various efforts to limit or outlaw slavery. As early as the 7th century, Saint Bathilde (wife of King Clovis II) became famous for her campaign to stop the slave trade. 

St. Anskar tried to halt the Viking slave trade.

Finally, in the 13th century, the great theologian Thomas Aquinas pronounced that slavery is a sin. But by then, it was not even a matter of controversy. It was the settled consensus among Christians that human bondage was wrong.

This history makes it even more surprising that slavery later made a comeback in the United States. American slaveholders were going against centuries of settled conviction that slavery was wrong.

And even then, who rose up to oppose the slaveholders? Who led the movement to abolish slavery? Mostly Christians. 

Many abolitionists were inspired by the Second Great Awakening, a series of religious revivals in the 19th century, which emphasized that all humans are created equal in the eyes of God.

For example, the famous revivalist Charles Finney, a Presbyterian minister, condemned slavery from the pulpit, calling it a “great national sin.” He refused to give communion to slaveholders. Finney was the president of Oberlin College, an important stop on the Underground Railroad, a network of secret safe houses for escaped slaves who were fleeing north.

Finally, there was the Civil War. America is the only country on Earth to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of its own citizens in a war to end slavery.

Sociologist Rodney Stark, in For the Glory of God, points out that it was not Enlightenment philosophers who crafted a moral indictment of slavery. It was mostly evangelical Christians, and they were motivated by their firm conviction that all people are made in the image of God."

--"Slavery and the Image of God," Science & Culture Today.
Link below

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

Maybe the people saying Black people are too stupid to get an ID to vote… are the racists.

Maybe the people saying married women can’t figure out how to get a birth certificate… are the sexists.

Maybe the people calling everyone else a threat to democracy… are the ones trying to rig it.

Maybe the people obsessed with “equity” while ignoring merit… are the ones holding people back.

Maybe the people who can’t name a single limit on immigration… are the extremists.

Maybe the people who say they’re fighting for the working class… while flying private, actually aren’t.

Maybe the people who say they care about the poor… have run every major American city for 50 years and made them ALL worse.

Maybe the people calling for more gun control… travel with armed security paid for by taxpayers.

Maybe the people who claim to love science… but can’t define what a woman is aren’t following it.

Maybe the people demanding unity while calling half the country fascists… don’t actually want unity.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Maybe it was never about justice, equity, tolerance, or democracy.

Maybe it was always about power.

And maybe the way you know that, is that they never stop accusing YOU of exactly what THEY are doing.

[Maria Davidson @MariaDavidson]

California's population grew 0.4% in the last decade.

The number of state employees grew 24.5%.

Total state spending grew 48%, inflation adjusted.

You have to ask - where did all the money go?

[Pablo Malo @pitiklinov]

Los filósofos Daniel Kodsi y John Maier sostienen que muchos de los fenómenos más absurdos y destructivos de nuestra época -desde la ideología de género, la cultura de la cancelación, el DEI, los encierros del COVID, el net zero, la abolición de la policía y prisiones, hasta la obsesión por “incluir” a toda costa- tienen una causa común: un vicio intelectual que ellos han llamado “excepcionalismo”. ¿Qué es el “excepcionalismo”?

El excepcionalismo es la tendencia patológica a hacer demasiadas excepciones a reglas, principios y generalizaciones bien fundamentadas, basándose en casos aislados, anécdotas emocionales o deseos particulares. En lugar de mantener principios simples y sólidos, el excepcionalista complica excesivamente las ideas para acomodar cualquier anomalía, excepción o caso especial que le importe. Esto produce teorías sobre-complicadas, frágiles y a menudo absurdas.

Los autores lo comparan con el problema científico conocido como “overfitting” (sobreajuste): cuando un modelo se ajusta tanto a los datos ruidosos o erróneos que pierde capacidad predictiva y se vuelve inútil.

El excepcionalista cree que existen ciertas personas o cosas a las que las reglas normales no les aplican. Más aún, cuando se pone a reflexionar, a menudo llega a negar que esas reglas sean reglas en absoluto, justamente porque no contemplan las excepciones que él exige para sus categorías protegidas o especiales. Hay dos tipos de excepcionalistas:
-El de mente única (single-minded): Se obsesionan con una sola causa o grupo protegido y subordinan todo lo demás a él (ejemplo: “minimizar muertes por Covid a cualquier costo”).
-El Indiscriminado (Indiscriminate): Ven excepciones en todas partes y complican todo constantemente (típico de activistas woke, periodistas y gente “chronically online”).

¿Y qué ejemplos dan los autores de excepcionalismo o a qué lo aplican. Ahí van unos cuantos:

-Ideología de género: Rechazar la definición biológica simple de “mujer” (hembra humana adulta) para acomodar casos raros o sentimientos subjetivos, creando teorías extremadamente complejas y contradictorias.

-Encierros del Covid: Priorizar solo las muertes por coronavirus e ignorar todos los demás daños (salud mental, educación, economía, aislamiento de ancianos, etc.).

-Cultura de la cancelación y restricciones a la libertad académica: La libertad de expresión se vuelve “sí, pero…” con infinitas excepciones para no ofender a ciertos grupos.

-DEI y políticas de diversidad: Se sacrifican estándares meritocráticos y objetivos educativos para acomodar metas de “inclusión”.

-Net Zero y políticas climáticas: Un objetivo único (cero emisiones) se impone aunque tenga costos desproporcionados en otros aspectos de la vida.

-Abolicionismo policial y de prisiones: Ignorar que la mayoría de crímenes los cometen reincidentes y proponer soluciones complejas en lugar de la solución simple y efectiva.

-Arte y cultura: Subordinar la calidad estética y el entretenimiento a objetivos políticos y de justicia social.

En resumen, muchos disparates modernos (según estos dos filósofos) tienen una raíz común: en vez de mantener principios claros y generales, la gente se obsesiona con excepciones, anécdotas y casos especiales, complicando todo hasta volverlo absurdo. A esto los autores lo llaman “excepcionalismo” y lo ven como el verdadero problema intelectual de nuestra época.

[Liam Out Loud @liam_out_loud]

In 1957, Carl Jung wrote:

"Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas."

Jung believed only a small “mentally stable” portion of the population keeps things together.

His estimate was that only ~40% are psychologically grounded.

The rest are one bad day away from breakdown.

The point he was making is that most people are not rational.

Their emotions possess them and when the pressure gets high enough:

- Logic stops working.
- Slogans take over.
- Fantasy replaces reality.

That’s when societies starts feeling like its upside down.

Jung called it a “psychic epidemic.” A kind of mass psychological contagion.

He estimated that for every crazy person you see, there are ten more that are able to mask their perversity just enough to fit in to society.

While they may not break out openly, their "views and behaviour, for all their appearance of normality, are influenced by unconsciously morbid and perverse factors."

In that state, irrational people rise to the top, extreme ideas are normalized, and emotion overrides truth.

"Their mental state is that of a collectively excited group ruled by affective judgments and wish-fantasies."

Their delusional ideas, which hide their fanatical resentment, appeal to the irrational, "for they express all those motives and resentments which lurk in more normal people."

"They are, therefore, despite their small number in comparison with the population as a whole, dangerous as sources of infection."