anna johnson

[Not the Bee @Not_the_Bee]

Op-ed: If you do not hate Islam, you cannot love God
https://t.co/9reqrINyLU

[L. David Fairchild @David_Fairchild]

This is very personal for me to share.

My biological mother was a stripper working at a club in downtown Seattle. My biological father was one of her clients. She became pregnant with me while struggling with addiction and used drugs throughout her pregnancy. When I was born, I was immediately taken to the ICU to detox and was eventually placed for adoption.

By God’s grace, I was adopted by two wonderful parents who loved me deeply. I was four months old when they picked me up from the orphanage, and they are the only parents I’ve ever known. I never grew up feeling like something was missing. I never felt some deep longing to find my biological parents. I had a mom and dad who loved me, cared for me, sacrificed for me, and gave me a wonderful home.

Years later, after I got married and we had our first child, my wife encouraged me to learn more about my biological history. If for no other reason, she thought it might be good for the sake of our daughter to know whether there was anything medically or genetically significant in my family history.

So I eventually submitted my DNA to Ancestry. Through that, I discovered a half brother, aunts, cousins, and eventually was put in contact with my biological mother.

We were able to meet.

And when I met her, I got to tell her something I’d wanted to tell her for as long as I could remember: thank you.

Thank you for giving me life.

I got to tell her about the wonderful parents who adopted me. I got to tell her that I’d had a good life. I got to tell her about my wife and my children. I wanted her to know that the baby she carried in the middle of all that chaos became a man with a family, a calling, people he loves, people who love him, and a life for which he is profoundly grateful.

I’ve never been angry with her. Never. Not once.

For years I told my wife and children that if my biological mother ever found me, I knew exactly what I would say. I wouldn’t condemn her. I wouldn’t demand explanations. I’d simply thank her for allowing me to live.

Because without that decision, I wouldn’t have the extraordinary wife I have today. I wouldn’t know the indescribable joy of my children. I wouldn’t have experienced the friendships, ministry, laughter, sorrow, beauty, failures, victories, and ordinary moments that have made up my life. There are people I love who wouldn’t know me, children who wouldn’t exist, and a story that never would’ve been written.

She gave me the chance to live it.

We still stay in contact. We speak every few months, and I genuinely enjoy hearing her stories and learning about her life. Since the day I met her, I’ve prayed that the Lord would bring her to Himself. I still pray that.

I share all of this because lately I’ve been thinking a great deal about the choices parents make. About life and death. About how much hangs in the balance of decisions made in moments of fear, desperation, darkness, or confusion.

And yes, I’ve been thinking about those three little children whose lives were taken by the very person entrusted with protecting them. It’s difficult for me not to think about my own story alongside theirs. Their lives mattered. Their futures mattered. Everything they might’ve become, everyone they might’ve loved, every ordinary Tuesday morning and Christmas morning and wedding and child and friendship that might’ve filled the decades ahead of them mattered.

And it makes me profoundly grateful that my mother chose differently.

So if there’s a mother or father reading this who’s in a dark place and wondering whether your presence matters, whether your decisions matter, or whether the people who depend on you would somehow be better off without you, please hear me: your choices matter more than you can see from where you’re standing.

Choose life.

Don’t make an irreversible decision in the middle of a season that will pass. Don’t allow a moment of darkness to make a permanent decision about a future you can’t yet see.

Trust the Lord. Ask for help.

[HowlingAdulterer @HowlingAdultery]

Society: “you can’t just murder your kids”

Women: “it’s ok I have a doctor’s note”

[Mandy @MarindaVannoy1]

Mom to mom, woman to woman, if she were truly innocent, she would beg for death. As a parent, you know I’m right.

[Josh Howerton @howertonjosh]

CS Lewis on why “dumb blue collar people” usually do not fall for the same terrible ideas that the “educated elite class” so often does:

“Why, you fool, it’s the educated readers who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem: we have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”

– CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength

… Or Romans 1: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools.”

[The Drunk Republican @DrunkRepub]

Gen Z be like “Buy me a house or I’ll vote for Stalin no cap.”

[Dan Burmawi @DanBurmawy]

Lebanon is a perfect model of what happens when two civilizations share geography without sharing a political philosophy.

It’s a small country, same language, same food, same weather, same ancient history. No walls. No checkpoints.

But each community, Christian and Muslim, lives behind invisible civilizational lines. They don’t mix in political life, educational life, or social life.

These lines have existed since the Ottomans, and they hardened after the civil war.

The Christian areas built their society around a European-influenced political culture: secular schools, mixed-gender social norms, individual rights, and a relatively open civic space.

The Muslim areas built "Islamic society".

The result is not “diversity," but dual sovereignty inside one state.

In 2023, the country literally split into two time zones during daylight-saving time, one Muslim and one Christian.

Neighbors who live in the same building had different times.

Lebanon is a failed state because it tried to fit two incompatible political visions under one flag.

The West is repeating Lebanon’s experiment but pretending it will end differently.

There is no historical precedent for that working

[Kelsey Piper @KelseyTuoc]

@hecubian_devil I think the fundamental disconnect here is that you wants politics to solve man's search for meaning and I want politics to deliver a prosperous, safe, free society in which everyone can go find meaning in something other than politics.

[Nick Freitas @NickJFreitas]

There are two types of people who love socialism.

1. Economic illiterates fueled by envy.
2. People who understand how easy it is to manipulate and control economic illiterates fueled by envy.

[Yogi @Houseofyogi]

Mamdani got the whole American dream in eight years. Came here as a kid, got citizenship in 2018, now he runs the biggest city in the country.

And on America's 250th birthday he sat down at George Washington's desk and told us everything wrong with the place.

I'm not even angry. I'm disappointed.

Here's the picture he painted:

He mocked the people who supposedly think America "becomes less the more people it welcomes."

Said it belongs "only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin."

Called our streets a place where "masked agents" are "terrorizing" people.

Said the country's wealth was built by "calloused, dirt-streaked hands" and then left to rot.

Looked out from Washington's desk and called the Americans who built this economy "small" and "weak."

Okay Mamdani. You hate it so much, why'd you come here?

Let's put that picture up against the actual country.

He's a Muslim kid born in Uganda and he's the mayor of New York. A guy back in his own birthplace said it plainly: over there he'd have had to claw his way in. Here we held the door open.

We've got the most diverse Congress in our history. It was never about skin color, no matter how many years the left spent forcing that story onto a country that kept proving them wrong.

A machine that grinds immigrants down? Nearly half the Fortune 500 was started by immigrants or their kids. 231 companies.

Apple, son of a Syrian.

Google, a kid who came over from the Soviet Union.

Amazon, son of a Cuban.

Put them together and they out-earn Japan, out-earn Germany. That's not a country grinding people into the dirt. That's a country handing them the keys.

It's been and always will be the land of opportunity.

And more people want in here than anywhere else alive. 53 million immigrants live here, the most of any nation on earth. We're 4% of the world's people and we hold 17% of the world's migrants.

Every year since 2007 you ask the whole planet where it'd go if it could go anywhere, the answer comes back the same. America. Number one. The line to get in wraps around the globe.

Here's the line he won't draw. I will.

Legal immigration built this country. The strivers. That's the front door working the way it's supposed to, and I'll defend it all day. You need to earn your spot, respect our laws and customs.

But that's not what we're running anymore.

Four years of Biden's open border blew the doors off. The foreign-born share of this country just hit 15.8%. An all-time high. Higher than Ellis Island, more than triple what it was in 1970.

The Census Bureau didn't expect that number until 2042 and we smashed past it. And on top of it, a record 14 million people here illegally, who cut in front of every single person who did it the right way.

The front door built America from Ellis Island to today. The fence is a different thing. Pretending they're the same is how you end up calling every American who wants a secure border a bigot.

And we've earned the right to standards. This is the most wanted country on the planet. We get to choose who walks in. You want in? Build something. Contribute. Earn it. Nobody's owed anything.

You come illegally, you commit crimes, you steal from taxpayers, you should get deported. That's not terrorizing the streets.

Mamdani walked through that front door in 2018. He of all people should be defending it. Instead he stood at Washington's desk and spent his speech blurring the line between the people who came the right way and the ones who broke in.

The man even admitted out loud that America is exceptional. Then spent the rest explaining why it isn't. On the one day the whole country stops to celebrate itself, he reached for the darkest story he could find.

That's not a man who's lost about America. That's a man who's angry at the country that gave him everything he has.

You don't like it here? Nobody made you come.

Nobody's stopping you from leaving. But you won't. They never do. Because there's nowhere else on earth that hands a person this much of a shot.

This country took him in and made him a mayor. He owes it. It doesn't owe him a thing.

We're not perfect. We're the best odds a human being has ever been handed. 250 years old, the richest and freest country alive, and the whole world is still clawing to get in while nobody's trying to leave.

They hold America to a standard they'd never hold anyone else to, then act shocked it falls short.

It's nonsense.

Respect the country. Especially when it's the reason you're standing at that desk at all.

[ThePointofAmerica @PointofAmerica]

https://t.co/GdnvjV3UwV

[Guy Benson @guypbenson]

This is Todd “Let’s Roll” Beamer, who died heroically while trying to retake United Flight 93 from Al Qaeda terrorists on 9/11. His final resting place, is in Cranbury, NJ — where he was living with his wife and children before his murder. Cranbury is located in NJ-12, where the new Democratic nominee for Congress is Adam Hamawy.

Hamawy was a close associate and translator to Omar Abdel-Rahman, aka the ‘Blind Sheikh,’ an arch terrorist convicted of masterminding multiple plots against targets in NYC — including the World Trade Center. Hamawy testified at Adbel-Rahman’s trial, as a defense witness.

It has also been reported that Hamawy traveled to Bosnia to volunteer at an organization that was later unmasked as an Al Qaeda front group.

One of Hamawy’s loudest and most high-profile supporters and endorsers has openly declared that America deserved the 9/11 attacks.

Hamawy is now the prohibitive frontrunner to represent Todd Beamer’s district in the United States Congress.

[Bad Hombre @Badhombre]

South Carolina has had a Black Secretary of State, a Black State Treasurer, two Black Lieutenant Governors, a Black Attorney General, and one of their U.S. Senators is Black.

ALL Republicans, by the way.

I remember when people were too embarrassed to display their ignorance.

[Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital]

"The court didn’t rule in my favor so we must destroy it, pack it, or replace the judges"

- Guy who calls Trump a threat to democracy

[Clay Travis @ClayTravis]

They all realize KBJ’s completely incompetent. Even the liberals. The worst president in any of our lives, Joe Biden, also gave us the worst Supreme Court justice, KBJ, in any of our lives. Thanks, Joe.

[Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee]

“After Charlie Kirk’s murder, Sharon McMahon chose to explain the hate, not condemn it. A commencement speaker is more than a guest, they're a reflection of what a university stands for.”

Raise your hand if you’d like @UVU to reconsider inviting Ms. McMahon speak at commencement.

[anna johnson @annaksjohnson]

@bulariat Baylor alum here. The decision to host TPUSA is quite literally constructing dialogue. The lack of self-awareness here is astounding. You labeled one of your slides "Civil Discourse Requires Balance" as you call for the side you dislike to be silenced. Great job, guys.

[Mark Hemingway @Heminator]

People forget that the worst part of her “basket of deplorables” comment was that she said people she didn’t agree with were “irredeemable.”

And now she’s lecturing people on empathy.

[Curtis Yarvin @curtis_yarvin]

I certainly never ever want to hear about ye olde “rule of law” again from anyone who believes it’s ok, fine, normal and even good, and awesome, and even morally necessary, for the paramilitary wing of the Democratic Party to harass and impede law enforcement officers

[Stew @Stewbiedo0]

A friend dating back to high school has a German life partner and spends a lot of time in Germany. Is there now and posted that he can’t take the US gestapo government anymore and is beginning the process to move there permanently. I’m like cool, you’re there now. You’re all set. He’s like no, I have to (lays out complex process of establishing permanent residency). I reply why bother with all that? You’re there now, stay. He explains that you just can’t just do that. There’s a process or you’ll get sent back. Interesting, I say.