When Barack Obama implemented his unilateral amnesty for illegal aliens who claimed to have entered this country before the age of sixteen, the illegally amnestied illegals qualified for many benefits.

One of these were FHA loans.

FHA loans are government-backed mortgages meant for poorer Americans unable to qualify for normal mortgages. Democrat abuse of the FHA helped lead to the Great Recession and in the years afterward, FHA insured loans hit losses of $70 billion. By 2012, the FHA was $16 billion in the hole and had to be bailed out. The delinquency rate for FHA loans is still more than three times higher than normal loans, and depending on the period, have hovered between 8% and 14%. Time to bring in the illegal aliens.

When Obama illegally implemented DACA, a program exempting certain illegal aliens from government action, they were also allowed to apply for FHA loans. How many illegal aliens obtained FHA loans?

In December, a letter from three Senate Democrats claimed that HUD barred “approximately 800,000 individuals approved for DACA from FHA-insured mortgage loans”. This refers to the total number of DACA illegal aliens and it’s unknown how many of them have obtained FHA loans in past years.

Ellie Mae’s millennial tracker estimated that the average size of an FHA loan to millennials is $186,454. Potential exposure to illegal alien mortgages could then climb as improbably high as $150 billion.

It’s unknown how many illegal aliens have taken out FHA loans, but some media stories have cited loan officers for whom illegal alien FHA loans represent a significant percentage of their business.

The Trump administration has applied the brakes to this avalanche of taxpayer-insured mortgages to illegal aliens. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had begun notifying lenders that the FHA was no longer in the illegal alien mortgage business. The reasons were common sense. DACA illegal aliens, or in media spin, DREAMERs, were not legal residents and weren’t being legalized.

Under Obama, FHA rules had been bent so far backward that people who were not only non-citizens, not only non-permanent residents, but weren’t even legally here, were having taxpayers guarantee their mortgages. Not only hadn’t the Democrats learned anything from the Great Recession, they were determined to make the irresponsible behavior of the FHA a decade ago seem sober and sensible.

And they aren’t giving up.

The December letter by Senator Menendez, who had recently been on trial for corruption charges, Senator Booker, on whose watch the $100 million poured into Newark public schools dissipated, and Senator Cortez-Mastro, who had been accused of taking dirty money, claimed to be, “appalled that the Trump Administration would exploit a federal government program to deny Dreamers an opportunity of owning their own home.” But it was the Democrats who had exploited a federal government program meant for poor Americans to benefit not only foreigners, but illegal aliens with no right to be here.

The letter by the three Senator Democrats falsely claimed that President Trump was targeting a “portion of the American public”, when in fact illegal aliens are not part of the American public. They demanded, “sound and unambiguous legal reasoning” for the move. The sound and unambiguous reasoning would be that illegal aliens are not legally resident in the United States and therefore do not qualify for loans.

The illegal alien mortgage business, built on the backs of American taxpayers, is obviously profitable. But it’s also a silent nuclear weapon threatening mass destruction of the economy in case of deportations.

The more illegal aliens end up with FHA loans, and as those FHA loans are turned into Ginnie Mae Mortgage Backed Securities, deporting DACA illegal aliens would risk mass defaults on FHA loans which are backed by American taxpayers. Quite a few Ginnie Mae bonds are being held by Japan and China.

That’s why HUD’s move of stopping the flow of FHA loans to illegal aliens is so vital and important.

Not only do FHA loans endanger our economic security, they also endanger our national security. Their very existence serves as political leverage to prevent the government from enforcing the law. Every illegal alien mortgage not only robs American taxpayers, but puts them at risk of even worse losses.

And considering the role of mortgage backed securities in the Great Recession, the threat is real.

However, HUD has carefully avoided taking a clear position to prevent the inevitable lawsuits and overrides by Obama and Clinton judges embedded in the federal judiciary. Instead HUD officials have successfully warned off many lenders by creating ambiguity about the status of DACA FHA loans.

The riskier illegal alien FHA loans appear, the more irresponsible taking them on will seem. And lenders will be aware of the shadow of the “False Claims Act” hanging overhead if they bite on illegal loans.

This is far from an ideal solution. But it’s an understandable response by a crippled executive branch that has had its legal powers stripped from it by Democrat activists operating under the guise of judges.

But taxpayer-backed mortgages for illegal aliens are only the tip of the tottering FHA iceberg that President Trump needs to begin shutting down to avoid another recession caused by bad loans.

FHA loans to non-citizens are also extended to non-permanent residents and even to “refugees”. The Office of Refugee Resettlement had even been promoting Freddie Mac’s Islamic Sharia-compliant mortgages for Muslim “refugees”. Foreigners here under Temporary Protected Status, a category that the Trump administration has begun winding down, are also potentially eligible for FHA loans.

The FHA is deeply dangerous and troubled. It is in desperate need of reform.

American taxpayers have long been exploited by the FHA as a piggy bank to pay off Democrat voters. But DACA FHA loans have taken this a step further by taking the economy hostage for illegal aliens.

The FHA loan was created to serve Americans. If it is to continue to exist, it should only serve Americans.

There has never been any reason given why the United States government should be extending its credit on behalf of foreigners, whether they are residents, temporary workers or, let alone, illegal aliens.

The risk of such loans has been rolled into the overall risk for Americans. And the buck was passed.

The artificial stimulation of the housing market isn’t reason enough for the government to be putting the economy at risk and taxpayers on the hook for the illegal aliens whom Democrats hope to turn into voters. DACA was an illegal policy. FHA loans for DACA recipients piles illegality on illegality.

American taxpayers should be let off the hook for illegal alien mortgages before the cost grows too high.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Votive candles of Robert Mueller III will set you back between 10 and 22 bucks. These candles feature everything from the standard black-suited G-man picture to one of a droopy Mueller in saintly robes pointing at his own glowing heart. By tomorrow or next week at the latest, you will be able to snag what Portland Monthly dubbed last year, the “hottest gift” of the holiday season in the bin at the Dollar store.

The candles, the buttons, the t-shirts, the mugs and the other Mueller tchotchkes which briefly made their peddlers wealthy, are all headed for that bin after he broke the hearts of his biggest fans.

Vogue dubbed Mueller, a 74-year-old lawyer, “America’s newest crush”. “He can evoke shades of Humphrey Bogart and has mastered a nearly Zoolander-esque gaze,” the style mag raved.

Just in January, Vanity Fair published an even trashier ode to Mueller, declaring, “Mueller Won the Hearts of America”. By America, the lefty mags, like all lefty culture manufacturers, meant themselves.

A lesbian folk band wrote a love song to Mueller, crooning, “I see you on TV / I see you in my dreams”.



Spike Lee wore a t-shirt that screamed, “GOD PROTECT ROBERT MUELLER”. Chelsea Handler tweeted, “I’m starting to have a real crush on Mueller.” Stephen Colbert compared him to Batman. A California artist claimed that looking at a picture of Mueller reassured him that everything would be okay.

“Since he's in charge, the world can be normal again,” he rhapsodized.

Tonight, the votive candles have gone out. Batman has fallen. And the lefties who went to bed believing in Mueller have lost their faith.

“Disappointed Fans of Mueller Rethink the Pedestal They Built for Him,” the New York Times gravely intones. In its piece, the paper quotes the host of a podcast, "Mueller, She Wrote", whose fans call themselves Muellerites, saying, “I’ve had to talk a couple people off the ledge.”

A law school prof who had posted a picture of herself lighting a Mueller candle comments, “There are definitely people who thought that Mueller would save us.”

But was it really these fans who had built Mueller’s pedestal of lies or was it the New York Times?

That paper, along with the Washington Post, MSNBC and a thousand less famous internet grifters had built Mueller’s fan base out of a crumbling pedestal of conspiracy theories and wishful thinking. Like the fans of another FBI based show, the lefties had wanted to believe. But the media made them believe.

The candles, the songs and the shirts were just the totems of a political mythology based on lies.

The Mueller investigation was never about Mueller. The Washington D.C. insider was just a useful front man for a team of Obama and Clinton supporters, most notably disgraced figure Andrew Weissmann, whose ugly tactics were all over the circus. Mueller was a partner in Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr: one of the most liberal law firms in an academic analysis of law firms by political lean.

He was ‘their’ guy. And more usefully, he had respectable law enforcement and Republican cred.

Media Mueller profiles dwelled on his clothes. “A traditional J. Edgar Hoover-era G-man uniform: dark suit, red or blue tie and white shirt—always white,” a Washington Post mythologized.

“He’s conscious that he’s a public figure, and he doesn’t want anything to compromise his integrity. Even a blue shirt," a Mueller ally told the paper.

Would a blue shirt have really compromised Mueller’s integrity? Costumes don’t make men ethical. But they can serve as useful disguises for unethical men. The “G-man uniform” and the regular haircut that progs, who normally chant, “Black Lives Matter” at law enforcement, gushed over, were costumes.

Robert Mueller III was also the costume that a bunch of Obama and Clinton allies wore. Mueller wore white shirts and dark suits. And the men and women behind Mueller wore him like a cheap suit.

Mueller’s fans, lighting votive candles with his face on it, needed someone to believe in. The political operatives who created a campaign to undermine confidence in the 2016 election, needed that too. They wanted someone to give their partisan campaign the professional look of a 74-year-old model willing to put his name on the investigation and be photographed wearing his costume to work.

Media profiles noted how little Mueller said. They invariably attributed this to professionalism. But a man who finds the time to portray his shirt choices as an ethical decision isn’t the strong silent type.

Occam’s Razor offers us a simpler answer. Mueller didn’t say anything because he had naught to say.

Mueller’s job was to be strong, silent type. The media could and did read anything into his silence. And millions of lefties heard in that deafening silence, potency, professionalism and confidence.

The half-ironic, half-sincere worship of Mueller was the political mythology of a pagan time in which there are no gods, only politicians who embody the failing sense of good and evil of the age.

“Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil,” Eric Hoffer once wrote. Trump is the progressive devil. Obama was its old god. And none of the candidates stumbling through the 2020 primaries had the memetic mythical power to topple their orange devil.

And so they believed in Mueller. They wore, “It’s Mueller Time” t-shirts and “In Mueller We Trust” caps. They reimagined MAGA as a statement not about American greatness, but about Mueller’s ruthlessness. “Mueller Ain’t Goin’ Anywhere”. Until he did. Mueller’s time is over and Mueller’s trust is broken.

As long as Mueller was silent and the report unknown, anything was possible. Mueller’s steadiness appeared to be a compelling antidote to the erratic tics and shiftiness of deep swampers like Clapper, Strzok and McCabe who projected not steady, strength, but personal weakness and failed ambition.

But there had to be a report. The investigation had to end. And the dream had to die.

The media made Mueller into a WMD of potential energy. But his kinetic energy discharged into a dud. Mueller’s team could hound assorted Trump associates, starting with the easiest catches, force them to plead guilty to process crimes and assorted unrelated violations, but they couldn’t take it any further. State’s witnesses might be enough for the Feds to bring down a lot of people, but not the POTUS. The media cheered as Mueller’s people collected a handful of scalps, and the votive candles were lit by progressive conspirazoids who thought that the public show meant that Trump’s head would be next.

But nailing people for unrelated charges is the first step of a conspiracy case. Without actual evidence of a conspiracy, beyond the testimony of the rats in the cage, it remains just another conspiracy theory.

Mueller did his job. Not on behalf of the American people. But on behalf of the Democrats who wanted him to harass, tie up and undermine the President of the United States. He took it as far as it could go. And provided material to local Democrats in New York and elsewhere looking to harass Trump more. But there was never going to be any hard evidence proving the bizarre Russian conspiracy theory invented by the Clinton campaign and circulated like poison gas in a sealed room by the media.

Collusion was never going to happen.

Millions of lefties were told to believe in a lie. It was a very profitable lie. Not just for the grifters selling Mueller knickknacks. The real money was in the media which made a fortune off the lefties eagerly subscribing to the New York Times, the Washington Post and watching MSNBC for the Mueller scoops.

Now the final Mueller story is in.

The conspiracy theories are however too profitable to die. They will be spun and respun. The theorists will push for the release of the report. They will claim that all the real dirt was censored out of the report. And then they will finally turn on Mueller, draw connections between George W. Bush, Putin, a UFO in orbit around Des Moines, Iowa, and Trump, and claim that Bob III was in on it all along.

That is what conspiracy theorists do.

They already know what the truth is. They merely needed Mueller to prove what they know. Or, as a recent New York Times op-ed put it, "We Don’t Need to Read the Mueller Report: Even if it is never released, the public already knows enough."

Like all holy books, the Mueller report is more than its mere text. It is the faith of its followers. They will go on believing in a true Mueller report while dismissing the real report and the real Mueller.

Mueller’s fans never knew who he was. He was an idea. Now the idea, like all lefty ideas, is dead. Its killer was that old villain named Reality who tears through lefty beliefs about economics and politics.

One messiah has fallen. It’s time to find another one.

Meanwhile, somewhere red hats are beaming and somewhere the sun shines bright. But there is no joy in Swampville, Mighty Mueller has struck out.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Seven years ago, Mohammed Merah pointed a gun at the head of 7-year-old Miriam Monsonego.

The blonde little girl was the daughter of the school principal and moments ago had been playing in a French schoolyard. The Monsonego family were Jewish immigrants from Morocco. The Ozar HaTorah school invaded by the Muslim terrorist was home to the children of Jewish refugees from North Africa and the Middle East who had fled to France after their countries had fallen to Muslim rule.

North African Jews had first received equal rights under French rule. When the French left, Jews lost their lives and their rights. Many began new lives again in places like Toulouse and its schoolyard.

But the Muslim violence that had deprived them of their rights and their lives followed them there.

Before Miriam, Mohammed had murdered a Rabbi and his two little boys, six and three years old. The other children ran. He cornered Miriam, grabbed the little girl by her hair, and pulled the trigger.

A miracle happened and the gun jammed. But with the determination that made him a hero to many French Muslims, he didn’t give up. He switched guns and shot her.

As she lay bleeding, he lifted up her head and shot the dying little Jewish girl two more times.

Miriam died in her father’s arms.

"I kissed her, I said 'goodbye', I did not think it was going to be the last time," her mother later said.

Seven years later, the brutal Islamic massacre of March 19 was commemorated in France, but forgotten outside it. The same American corporate media focusing in detail on shootings in New Zealand, with a special emphasis on the victims, hadn’t paid much attention to Miriam even right after her death.

An AP story of a little over a hundred words briefly covered the anniversary. Miriam’s name was left out.

But the story isn’t over. It’s just beginning.

In 2018, anti-Semitic acts increased 74% in France. Mohammed Merah, Miriam’s killer, remains a hero to many Muslims. Even though both Merah was a terrorist trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan, a popular French documentary portrayed the killer as suffering from mental illness. “I Love Death as You Love Life”, a play by Mohammed Kacimi about the terrorist was condemned by families of the victims.

The play was based on Merah’s rants to the police in which the “soldier of Allah” declared that Jews had to be “removed from the face of the earth” and that he regretted not being able to “kill more Jews”.

A year after the massacre, a man wearing an Arafat shirt was photographed performing the quenelle, an ironic version of the Heil Hitler salute spread by Muslim and leftists in French pop culture to taunt Jews, outside the school. Muslim hip-hop acts in France have celebrated Merah and his murderous spree.

Merah’s massacre of Jewish children was not accidental. Nor was it one man’s horrifying crime.

The origins of the attack lay in Islamic anti-Semitism. Merah identified as a “soldier of Allah”. His murderous hatred for the Jews came not merely from YouTube videos, but Islamic family values.

Mohammed had been “raised to be an anti-Semite because anti-Semitism was part of the atmosphere at home," Abdelghani Merah, his brother, had said.

Another brother was an Al Qaeda supporter who was sentenced to twenty years in prison in 2017. Souad, his sister, praised Mohammed, and said that, "Jews deserved to be killed."

When the New York Times ventured into a Muslim neighborhood in Toulouse later that year, it had no trouble finding locals who praised the Muslim terrorist as a “hero” and a “martyr of Islam”.

A Muslim family tried to name their child after him.

To understand the origins of Rep. Omar or Rep. Tlaib’s anti-Semitism, look to the Merah family.

Shortly after the attack, a rally in support of Merah was held. Slogans in support of the Muslim terrorist were spray painted outside the site of the massacre and near the Great Synagogue of Toulouse.

The 2019 anniversary commemorations were held behind barricades under the protection of a heavy police presence. The Interior Minister described the dead as, "victims of anti-Semitism, this poisonous infection." But there was no mention of the Islamic motivations for the massacre of Jewish children.

Statements by public officials attributed the attack, along with so many others, to “barbarism”, to “radicalism” and to “racism”.

“Seven years after the massacre,” Miriam’s father, Yaacov Monsonego, who still works at the school where his daughter was murdered, said: “Seven as the number of victims. As the age of Miriam, the little princess who should have been in her class right now.”

A few of Miriam’s classmates, now teenagers, remembered her as being a very special girl.

Outside the school, the haunting sounds of El Moleh Rachamim, Lord of Mercy, the Jewish prayer for the souls of the dead, rang in the air. “Holy and pure, they shine like the radiance of the heavens”, “beloved children who were murdered”, “shelter them eternally under your wings”, and “the Lord is their inheritance, may they rest in peace”.

Miriam, who will always be seven, and never eight, who will never join her classmates at the mall, will never date, will never have children of her own, is at rest on Jerusalem’s Har HaMenuchot, the Mount of Rest, where no one will scrawl Islamist slogans on her grave or perform the quenelle in front of it.

The Jews of Toulouse are also leaving. The Jewish Deputy Mayor of Toulouse urged the Jews to stop wearing identifiable clothing and declared that, “the future of the Jewish people in Europe is hopeless.” 600 Jewish families had left Toulouse and emigrated to Israel since the brutal schoolyard attack.

Merah’s crime had accomplished its purpose. The ethnic cleansing of the Jews of the area.

The Deputy Mayor was soon forced to apologize for blaming Jewish flight on political Islam and the sizable Muslim population. Toulouse’s mayor relived him of his duties and demanded his resignation.

In an echo of the Democrat refusal to support a resolution condemning Rep. Omar’s anti-Semitic comments, a move to have Muslims condemn anti-Semitism last year met with “violent” opposition.

Also last year, Imam Mohamed Tatai of the Grand Mosque of Toulouse urged Muslims to kill Jews.

The prophet of Islam, the leader of an interfaith dialogue group “told us about the final and decisive battle: ‘Judgement Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews. The Jews will hide behind the stones and the trees, and the stones and the trees will say: Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.'"

The infamous Hadith not only appeared in the Hamas charter but is popular in the Muslim world. And the Islamic hate that killed Miriam still haunts the darkening streets and homes of Toulouse.

Many of Toulouse’s Jews had fled Islamic hate in the Middle East. They are fleeing it again in France.

The Muslim massacre of Jewish children in Toulouse came a few weeks after the Jewish holiday of Purim. Miriam and the other murdered children would have had one last year in which to dress up in costumes, eat candy and enjoy life in celebration of G-d’s defeat of Haman’s plot to massacre the Jews.

2,400 years ago in the Middle East, a man named Haman wrote a fatwa to, “exterminate, murder and destroy all the Jews, from lads to elders, children and women.” The Hamans of Islam have written countless such fatwas. “There are no civilians in Israel. The population—males, females and children—are the army reserve soldiers, and thus can be killed,” Sheikh Rashid Ghannouchi declared.

The New York Times dubbed Ghannouchi a “moderate”. The Washington Post praised him as a “scholar” and a “voice of hope”. Reuters called him a “respected scholar”. Obama’s State Department feted him.

The same media outlets that have cried in outrage over the New Zealand mosque shootings praise the “moderate” Islamist “scholars” who urge the mass murder of Jewish children.

Purim celebrates the defeat of Haman’s genocidal plot. But the Hamans of today are all the rage.

The seventh anniversary of the massacre occurred only a few days before Purim under the shadow of murderous Islamic anti-Semitism around the world, from threats in Toulouse to rockets over Tel Aviv, from Rep. Omar’s anti-Semitism in Washington D.C. to support for Iran’s nuclear program in Brussels.

Its brief prayers are quickly silenced by the media’s propaganda, smears and silence.

The children of Toulouse who stood at a vigil mourning their dead classmates will once again put on costumes, deliver treats and sing. But they will do so quietly because, though it cannot be said, Toulouse has more Mohammeds than Mordechais. And many of them call Mohammed Merah a role model.






Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Tonight the celebration of the holiday of Purim begins. Purim is a Jewish holiday often neglected outside the more religious communities in America and the State of Israel because it commemorates an attempt to exterminate the Jews. And we all know that stopped being a problem long ago.

If Purim had culminated with some smart power diplomacy and a lesson on tolerance, liberal Jews might be more inclined to celebrate it. Unfortunately it ends with a genocidal madman being hung from a tree and the Jews fighting for their lives, winning and slaughtering their enemies.

And instead of feeling guilty about it, their descendants eat pastries, dress up in costumes and get drunk. At least those of their descendants who believe in survival instead of surrender.

Liberal Jews complain about the difference of values they have with Israeli Jews who insist on survival instead of surrender. They have an even bigger difference of values with the Jews of the Bible. And with Jews throughout history. Not to mention with the religion of the Jewish people.

The more liberal a Jew is, the less likely he is to celebrate the substance of his people's holidays as they conflict with his worldview and virtues. Moshe, the Maccabees and Mordechai don't seem like role models, not even if you rebrand them as community organizers and claim that they were fighting prejudice. There is something relentlessly bloody-minded about them. They care very little about a sustainable environment or LGBT rights, and instead walk through the corpses of their enemies with no regrets or apologetic winces. They stand up for their own people in a regrettable show of tribalism that perpetuates the cycle of violence instead of preaching about Tikkun Olam.

The story of the Megillah, the Scroll of Esther, is the story of how Mordechai, the descendant of the first Jewish king of Israel, snubbed the Grand Vizier of a multicultural empire by refusing to bow to him. The obstinate Benjaminite so infuriated the Vizier that he plotted to kill all the Jews.

The smart thing to do would have been to bow to Haman. To invite him to AIPAC and let him give a pre-written speech and then give him a standing ovation. Then the important official might have been willing to help out the struggling Jews of the Second Commonwealth in Israel. Instead the narrow-minded fanatic offended Haman. And the angry Agagite decides to strangle the newly reborn Second Commonwealth of Israel and all the other Jews throughout the Persian Empire.

By refusing to bow to Haman, Mordechai had turned the formerly moderate Haman into an extremist. He had radicalized him. Jewish leaders hurried to reassure Haman that this fanatic was in no way representative of their values of tolerance and appeasement. Hadn't they attended the feast where the sacred vessels of their own people were used to serve wine and spirits to the mob? Rather than anticipating the return to their land at the end of the prophesied 70 year period of exile, they had cheered the brutish tyrant and made Sushan, his capital, into their new holy city.

A few tens of thousands had gone back to Israel, which the empire had repopulated with other peoples. There they struggled to survive, building half the day and keeping watch with their spears from the time the stars came out until the sun rose.  Most Jews however had remained behind in the Persian Empire. The struggling settlements of the Jews under the last of the prophets seemed like a futile proposition. The future belonged to empires, to Babylon, Persia and Rome. 

There was no room anymore for the sort of pride displayed by Mordechai. This was Haman's hour. Israel was gone and would never return. Rebuilding the Temple was a fool's dream. Why go off to some place your ancestors had come from, to slave in the hot sun, to choke on dust and sleep with a spear by your side expecting an attack from the nomads that had settled in the land?

In Sushan, the wine is plentiful, the bazaars are never closed and the empire will never fall.

There is no room for ancient dreams in the new empire. No room for old fables about slavery and freedom. Perhaps in ancient times some deity had liberated them from Egypt, but here in the modern present, it was the fall of the Babylonian Empire which had raised them up out of slavery and given them a place among the subject peoples of a new empire. They bowed to Haman and to the new order. They gave up their dreams and their religion and drank headily of the wine at the festival of the king. On their couches, they dreamed they saw a new world opening before them.

But Mordechai, narrow-minded fanatic that he was, only saw an old world. And he was determined to fight for it. He wasn't willing to let the old dreams die. To bow to Haman and to imagine, as so many Jewish leaders have done, that some accommodation with evil could be made on mutually beneficial terms. Mordechai was not a man of the Empire. He was an Ish Yehudi. A Jew.

He saw through the illusion of empires and new ages. He saw what his first ancestor had seen when he looked at the sky. He saw that the only true permanence was G-d. Nations would fall, empires would perish and even the stars would burn out. Only G-d would endure.

And so he did not bow. And Haman understood what his refusal meant.

Had Mordechai refused to bow out of personal pride, Haman might have had him and his family killed. But Mordechai refused to bow to Haman because he was a Jew. Haman sensed that the old man had seen through him. The emperor was naked. The old man in rags at the gates did not worship power. He might rule, but had no appetite for it. He worshiped only G-d.

Was it personal conviction? Haman investigated and learned that Mordechai was a member of an  obscure people. A people who do not worship the empire, but worship G-d.

And so they all had to die. The king was bribed. The letters were sealed and sent. The decree was death. It was all over.

But Mordechai had seen more than the nakedness of Haman, the crawling, insecure lackey, filled with hatred for the Persian ruler, flattering him and craving the ultimate power he could not have. He had seen the nakedness of the empire and the age. His eyes had seen past the horses and palaces, the ranks of scribes penning decrees, the harems, bureaucracies and armies.

Mordechai knew that all this would pass away. He had seen through the illusion that every age brings with it the end of history, a new age whose achievements break with the past and usher in a boundless future. The shadow crosses the sundial, the walls come crashing down and the new era of history ends up buried under the rubble of time.

Exile divides the Jewish people into Jews and New Age Jews. Jews wander on their meandering course through history concerning themselves with a past that modern people dismiss as myth and legend, more ancient than that story about Troy, and even more dubious.

The New Age Jews always see the coming of a new era of history, a bright and shining plateau that makes all those old moldy beliefs completely irrelevant. History ends and now a new age of human progress begins. The age of Alexandria, the age of Sushan, the age of Berlin. How, in such a new age, could they be expected to take a few bygone fairy tales retold by barbarians seriously? Such things weren't for enlightened people who were witnessing the peak of human civilization.

The old Jews know what the New Age Jews do not, that history has not ended, that the past is still with us and that it has sharp teeth. They know that Man has not changed, that his sophistication is still only a shell and that sooner or later the shell cracks. If it does not crack from within, then it is cracked from without. 

Those who feel time in their bones know the patterns of history, reading ages like constellations, can never lose themselves in one age or fall into the fallacy of a new era. They know that there is nothing new under the sun. Machines may come and go, but the world is a broken place because the hearts of men have not turned from their ways. And so they remember that every age carries within it the seeds of its ruin. They witness the ruin, climb out of the ashes and move on.

Liberal pieties embrace the new age, fixate on a final transformative era of history at the hands of messiahs who promise hope and change, who will uplift us and inspire us to make the world into a better place. But history never ends. That is the lesson of the Holocaust, of Purim and of countless other horrifying intrusions of the old into the new. The shining new era that begins with grand public spectacles and displays of the power and might of an empire, ends with corpses and men and women fighting and running for their lives.

Jews like Mordechai understand this. New Age Jews do not.

The confrontation between Mordechai and Haman was a collision between two different conceptions of history. It was a contest for the Jewish soul.

Mordechai defied Haman to remind the Jews, who had abandoned religion and nation for the new age of the Persian Empire, of the ugly and bloody truths under the hollow glories of that new age.

In every age, the Jewish soul is nearly lost and then redeemed. The people seem on the verge of vanishing, but then survive. Mordechai understood that the future of the Jews did not depend on the Persian Empire. It depended on their willingness to remember who they were. And so he defied Haman and brought on a Holocaust. And at the end of it, the Jews fought for their survival.

Purim, a holiday preceded by a fast kept by the men going into battle and their loved ones, is not about forgiving your enemies, progressive taxation or coming out of the closet. It is about survival. Not mere survival, but the skin of the teeth sense of how close we came, that moment of revelation which pulls back the curtains of the material world and reminds us of the impossibility of our survival under all the ordinary rules of the world that new ages are found on. It reminds us that behind the scenes of the brick and mortar, steel and steam world, is something else entirely. A force that breaks apart the towers of history, that saves us when we should have died, that has entrusted us with a mission. It reminds us of what the world is and reminds us of Itself and of what we are.

When you stand on the edge of death, life is a revelation. It is not our deaths under the Egyptian sun, the blades and bullets of a thousand empires and kingdoms, or the ovens of Dachau that we are obsessed with. It is that moment of survival. The revelation that even amid the horrors of all that we have witnessed and the terrible things that we had to do to survive, we have risen out of the ground, watched the flesh cover our bones and stood alive again upon the earth. Every time we survive, we are reminded of the fragility of the world and of our enemies who wielding every power and trick, have failed to destroy us. Each time we rise, we transcend the world, in confronting our dead, we confront our immortality.

It is not a purely joyous experience. The day of Purim is preceded by a day of fasting. Before the celebration comes a day of battle as the struggle to survive, the long decline into the abyss, the final desperate hours, suddenly give way to the upheaval of an impossible salvation. We remember the pain, the sense of the grave closing over us, the bodies lying everywhere, the certainty that we will be next. We accept the hopelessness of our situation and then we walk out of the grave and praising G-d, sit down to the feast.

This is Jewish history. It is an alien one to the New Age Jew who clings tightly to the new era and its rules, to its pieties and its mores, who scowls at the old ones for refusing to come and join the imperial festivities where the vessels of the temple are used to serve drinks and the mob toasts that the 70 years have come and gone, and still there is no chance of the Jews returning to their Jerusalem and reclaiming the lost history. "The past is the past," says the New Age Jew. "The past is the present is the future," says the Jew.

The feast of the New Age is the celebration of the end of history, a golden time when there is an unlimited bounty for all, where the wine and the free health care will never run out, where everyone will live together under one government in perfect brotherhood for all time. Many Jews are drawn to this feast, its golden vessels, its vast bounty and its glorious ideals. But then enters the Grand Vizier and some of them begin to frown for though he wears rich garments and speaks soothing words, he is a monster. They don't always know how they know it, but it is a nagging feeling that creeps into them that there is something rotten at the heart of this new age.

Most of them still bow to him, touching their heads to the floor, some even embrace him and celebrate his vision. They assure others that he is our friend, the only man who can realize the promise of this age, a wise and noble leader whose vision of change brings new hope. But one or two stay away from the feast and refuse to bow to him. Instead they look to Jerusalem, to where the battle between good and evil was once fought, and where it will be fought again. They know him for what he is.

The Grand Vizier knows that he must destroy them, must destroy them all, because they have seen through what he is, and they have seen through the shallow trappings of the golden age of fools. They know that there is more to the world than the might of men and the cornucopias of kings. They know that he is not all-powerful and when he looks at them, a scowl wrinkles his face, because he knows it too.

So he casts a lot, random chance in a random world where chance is supreme and the whim of every ruler outweighs the weight of history. The bills are signed, the laws are passed, the decrees go out, the officers from the vast imperial bureaucracy are assigned to inform every citizen that their new age will be inaugurated with blood. A people who are not a proper part of the multicultural empire of laws must be wiped out in a properly democratic fashion. Crowd-sourced genocide.

And then the Grand Vizier ends up dangling from a rope, the tanks break through to Berlin, the chariots fall into the sea, the mustachioed dictator dies in a bedroom in Moscow his clothes soaked in his own urine-- and everything has gone completely wrong.

It's an old story and a new story. We tell it over and over again because it is always happening. It is our story and the story of the world. It is the story we have accepted from our parents and it is the story that we will pass on to our children. It is the story of the blood sacrifice of the New Age that goes wrong. The sacrifice survives, bloodied and scarred, the New Age goes down to ruin.

Purim exists because Queen Esther asked the Jews of Israel to write of her for generations. The Persian Empire she had become a part of, the sacrifice she made by leaving the physical stream of Jewish history to be repaid by becoming a vital part of its spiritual history, would fall. Not in her time, but it would. The memory would be carried on by the Jews. Purim is that memory.

Jewish holidays celebrate the interconnection of Jewish survival and productivity with G-d.  The Second Commonwealth fell. Israel may fall. A thousand years from now, the world may little resemble anything we can imagine. And yet, somewhere, Jewish children will celebrate Purim as they have for thousands of years. They may even celebrate other holidays, still unimagined, other memories of salvation from horrors yet to come and remembrances of tragedies yet to be experienced. And if we look through history, as Mordechai did through Haman and the Persian Empire, we may be able to see them on the other side, the descendants of those who survived the whips of Egypt, the slave markets of Babylon, the armies of Rome, the sword and the flame, the concentration camp and the suicide bomber, celebrating a million holidays yet to come.

"This is our final chance," Robert Francis 'Beto' O'Rourke warned while gesticulating wildly in a hipster Iowa coffee shop. "The scientists are unanimous that we have no more than 12 years.”

While patrons of the Lost Canvas wait for the apocalypse to overtake us, they enjoy espressos, bubble tea and art classes. There are also "handmade items from local artisans" for those preparing for a world without technology after the Green New Deal, which O'Rourke endorsed in his prediction of a twelve-year climate apocalypse, has outlawed cars, planes, cows, industrial civilization and machine tools.

Local espresso hipsters weren’t too worried that everything they know will be gone in twelve years, possibly including mango flavored coffee, which tastes as bad as it sounds, because they know that Bobby Francis doesn’t really mean that the world will end in twelve years: they’ve heard it all before.

Also, on his journey across the country, Bobby had lost track of the timeline. The IPCC deadline is supposed to hit in 2030. It’s now 2019. That means 11 years and some months until the end.

Are the scientists unanimous about that twelve-year deadline until the sky falls?



Bobby was quoting the UN’s IPCC report to the espresso oppressed of Keokuk, Iowa. The only things that the UN is unanimous about are not following New York City parking laws and hating Jews.

“It’s a line in the sand and what it says to our species is that this is the moment and we must act now,” Debra Roberts, a co-chair of the IPCC's working group on impacts, declared. “This is the largest clarion bell from the science community and I hope it mobilizes people.”

Roberts is a South African city official who is environmentalist royalty and has sat on endless numbers of commissions, panels, teams and moots. Which part of the “science community” does she hail from? Her CV, which the IPCC site decided to take down as part of its commitment to transparency, notes that she has a PhD in Urban Biogeography from a Durban university that no longer exists under that name.

The IPCC is famous for the same two things as most madmen standing on street corners and shouting incomprehensibly at the top of their hoarse voices: predicting and postponing the end of the world.

"If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future," IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri had claimed in 2007.

In 2008, he appeared to have claimed that there was only 8 years left.

At a 2009 Senate hearing, two years later, Pachauri insisted, “we have just about 6 years left in which we will have to bring about peaking of emission.”

That would be in 2015.

Pachauri was replying to a question from Senator Jeff Merkley. A decade later, the world didn’t end. And Merkley is still warning that if we don’t listen to the IPCC, the world and all its coffee shops will end.

Last year, Merkley pushed a Senate resolution in support of the IPCC’s latest world ending memo warning that the world will end “as soon as 2040”. That’s safer than the world ending by 2015.

What’s Pachauri’s scientific basis for making all these claims?

His CV, which has also been taken down by the IPCC site, notes that he has a PhD in Industrial Engineering and Economics. That’s better than Urban Biogeography, but not exactly relevant.

As a railway engineer, Pachauri could probably make the trains run on time like Mussolini. But his apocalypses always keep getting stuck in a limbo of missed timetables and snarled tracks.

Democrat politicians keep getting their apocalypse timetables from railway engineers and urban biogeographers before wandering into the nearest coffee shop to warn that the “End is Near”.

Bobby O’Rourke claims that we have only twelve, or eleven years and change, left. And that the “scientists are unanimous” in forecasting a world without coffee shops. Are they really?

Last year, the head of climate and ecological science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab was claiming that it was 25 years. Does that mean that California has 25 years while Iowa only has 12 years left?

And yet people are moving from California to Iowa.

The year before, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis was claiming that it was ten years. If you’re keeping track, that means the apocalypse may only be eight years away now.

In 2008, Andrew Simms, the co-director of the New Weather Institute, claimed that we had only 100 months to avoid disaster. And he urged a Green New Deal, long before AOC, as the answer.

Andy’s 100 months expired a few years ago. The world and its artisanal coffee shops are still here.

“I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change," NASA's James Hansen, the prophet of chicken littleism, claimed in 2006. "No longer than a decade, at the most."

A decade later the planet is still here. So is James Hansen.

And NASA is back to reaching for the moon instead of warning that the world will end in [Insert Number of Years Here] unless we go back to the caves and cultivate tofu plantations under the stalagmites.

Then in 2009, Hansen warned that Obama had only four years to save the earth. So either by 2013, the earth was saved and we have nothing more to worry about.

Or this is heaven. Or perhaps hell, since Hansen is in it.

The world is always ending a few years down the road. If the false prophets are feeling casual, they may give us a decade.

Even two.

It’s always urgent that we sign the latest agreement, implement the latest program and push more money into the pockets of the very people telling us that the world will end if we don’t.

Warmists mock religious believers, yet their shady tactics and millenarian nonsense makes even the nuttiest Times Square cultist waving a cardboard sign seem credible. Their cult is always promising that the world will end next Tuesday and then changing it to next Wednesday and then the week after that.

The Democrats are stuck in the coffee shop at the end of the world with Bobby O’Rouke. There are espressos, lattes, handcrafted soaps that smell like rancid fat and predictions that the world will end.

This is the cult and this is its catechism.

Its priests are railway engineers and urban bioengineers. There is a consensus. An absolute truth. Put a dollar in the plate to save the icebergs and see you in church next Sunday for another latte.

Vote ‘Beto’ to save the planet from the people who have children, drive old cars and use shopping bags. The infidels who get their coffee plain black, for under three bucks, and use store bought soaps.

Stop by the coffee shop with Bobby and you’ll understand why.

"Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil," Eric Hoffer, the longshore philosopher, once said.

In the hipster coffee shops, there is no god but the trend. The mass movement worships itself. The coffee shop is a celebration of yuppie consumerism infused with spirituality through the climate devil. Its leaders are narcissists who promise to save them from the apocalypse of the good life. That’s Bobby.

Twelve years. Twenty-five years. Six years. It doesn’t really matter.

The numbers create a sense of urgency in the latte section before the next art class. Their contradictory nature is one of those mysteries of faith that all religions have. And if the prophets are an Indian railway engineer and a South African municipal official, that is the diversity which passes for lefty spirituality. Any movement that brings together different people from around the world must be vaguely sacred.

And the numbers do one more thing.

To paraphrase Mrs. Iselin, no one is talking about whether the world will end. Only when it will end.

Meaningless numbers move the debate past whether the world is ending and to the exact date when it will end. It assumes that the apocalypse is nigh and it’s only a matter of determining whether we will be reduced to cannibalism and socialism in 2030, 2040 or 2052. Until then, have another mango espresso.

It tastes just like the end of the world.




Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine at the above link.

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