Warning: Some difficult things to read ahead. But it’s important to face the truth, even when . . . especially when . . . the truth is awful.

As the folks who attend the Cup & Table Co. gatherings will attest, a consistent prayer of mine over the last several years has been that hidden things would be revealed. And that people, institutions, organizations, and nations that are not what they purport to be would be exposed as what they truly are.

One positive (although appalling) aspect of the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas is that the atrocities, and Israel’s utterly rational response to them, have caused many masks to drop to the ground. The true nature of many groups and individuals is suddenly on public display.

And that’s a good thing. It’s good to know the truth.

Of course at the top of that list is Hamas itself, although only the clueless and the self-deluded were surprised by the barbarity of their attack. (Digital evidence is abundant. Proud Hamas militants uploaded GoPro video of their heroic exploits to the social media site Telegram.) Israeli first responders report finding families in which childrens fingers and feet were amputed in front of their parents, whose eyes are gouged out, and then all shot. They report little girls with broken pelvises, suggesting atrocities that I will not spell out here. The list of unspeakables gleefully and proudly perpretrated by Hamas in a few short hours would fill a book.

Those of us who have bothered to acquaint ourselves with Hamas’ tactics over the last 20 years–and those of other militant Islamist groups–were not remotely surprised by the barbarity. But for many political liberals here in the West, it’s been a shocking revelation. The reality of Hamas doesn’t fit the preferred narrative.

No, Hamas coming out as ISIS 2.0 wasn’t that much of a surprise. Far more revealing has been the response of many groups and individuals here in the U.S. and the U.K. who, at minimum, made excuses for the butchers of 10/7, and often cheered and celebrated their work.

Here are a few of the folks that have just put their true selves on public display.

1. Antifa / BLM / DEI Zealots / Identitarians / Decolonizers . . .

. . . 1619 Project-ers / Critical Race Theorists / Human Extinction Environmentalists / Throwers of Paint on Priceless Works of Art / Occupiers of Wall Street / Users of the Term “Whiteness / Etc., Etc., Etc.

I lump these groups together becuase there is so much overlap in their ranks, assumptions, and objectives. For some time I’ve been pointing out that at the root of all of these cult-like groups is a white-hot hatred for Western Civilization (which they incorrectly view as being “white” but correctly view as having Christian underpinnings.) (At the root of the roots is what the Bible calls an anti-Christ spirit.) See this recent post for example.

It explains why these groups uniformly despise the arts, science, capitalism, the traditional family, traditional marriage, child-bearing, sex roles, and pretty much everything that has contributed to human flourishing and freedom over the last 2000 years.

The vocabulary and branding changes but the agenda never does. It’s the same toxic hybrid of Marxism and Paganism we’ve seen since the sixties. It’s just that the sixties campus radicals are now running all of our nation’s core institutions. One of the most recent buzzwords they’ve rolled out is “decolonize.”

Over the last couple of years we’ve seen calls to “decolonize the curriculum” in schools; “decolonize the arts”; and to decolonize everything from physics to farming. Just hours after the horrors of the October 7th attack became known, Najima Sharif, a contributing writer to several U.S. publications, including Teen Vogue magazine, posted these words on X:

What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.

Najima Sharif

I, for one, knew precisely what decolonization meant, and therefore wasn’t remotely surprised when America’s “decolonizers” celebrated and cheered the gleeful slaughter of Oct. 7. It means rolling back, “by any means necessary,” the progress, modernity, liberty, prosperity, and social mobility that Western Civilization has made possible as it has spread.

Maybe learn to spell Israel before speaking truth to power about Israel. (Someone “decolonized” the spelling curriculum.) Which brings me to another group illuminated by recent events.

2. Colleges and Universities

In our “elite” universities, we’ve seen Jewish students holed up in a library in fear while angry mobs shouted for the extermination of all Jews. A “clean” world is the euphemism.

Sane voices have been sounding the alarms about higher education in America for decades now. Among scores of books and essays I could cite, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and Robert Bork’s Slouching Toward Gomorrah (1997) stand out for me. But until recent weeks many Americans remained largely unaware of what cesspools of Marxism-Paganism college faculties and administrations have become; or the degree to which the public education system that is feeding students into those universities has been transformed into a machine designed to indoctrinate students into the new state religion. It’s a faith that holds up the State as the Messiah and Western Civilization as the devil.

A three-year-old survey of American adults 18-39 both explains some of what we’ve observed on college campuses and serves as Exhibit Z in an indictment of the education system. In a 2020 survey, nearly two-thirds of US younger adults said they were unaware that six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Anad another 23 percent said said they believed the Holocaust was a myth. That leaves about 10 or 12 percent of people under 40 who actually know the historical truth.

Not good, but it explains a lot.

I’m generally a hopeful, optimistic person. But it’s difficult to imagine how the American educational complex can be salvaged or reformed at this point, even if the necessary public will to do so could be summoned, which it can’t. The only course of action may be to wait for the inevitable collapse, dismantle the entire thing, and salt the earth it formerly occupied. Then build something new from scratch.

3. Unlimited Immigration Advocates

For decades now, both Europe and the U.S. have largely pursued a policy of allowing (and frequently encouraging) large-scale third-world immigration. During his 2020 campaign for president, Mr. Biden signaled that, if elected, he’d reverse most Trump-era restrictions and effectivelly throw the floodgates open. Almost immediately, millions began preprarations to head to Mexico.

Many Progressives favor mass third-world immigration for the same reasons they want to “decolonize” the math cirriuculm and purge Palestine of Jews “From the River to the Sea.” Namely a visceral hatred for Western Civilization and it’s values. This, and slavery to a related narrative about Oppressors (always white) and The Oppressed (always non-white).

To be fair, other powerful interests have favored wide-open immigration spigots as well. (2 million new illegals last year alone.) Particularly Wall Street interests who covet ultra-cheap labor at the low end of the economy and cheaper software developers and systems designers for the tech sector via abundant H1B visas.

By the way, anyone who wants (as I do) to see higher wages for the working poor and preservation of a social safety net of welfare programs will oppose mass immigration . . . but only IF they can do basic math and understand anything about economics. (I know that’s a lot to expect.)

And they will oppose it IF (as I do) they understand that Western values and assumptions undergird the prosperity, freedom, progress, and order that makes this a place everyone wants to live.

There are more groups showing us who they really are right now. We’ll take a look in Part 2 of this diatribe.